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+Project Gutenberg's The Marble Faun, Volume I., by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Marble Faun, Volume I.
+       The Romance of Monte Beni
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2006 [EBook #2181]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBLE FAUN, VOLUME I. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Pullen and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MARBLE FAUN
+
+or The Romance of Monte Beni
+
+
+By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+In Two Volumes
+
+This is Volume One
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+     Volume I
+
+     I       MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
+     II      THE FAUN
+     III     SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
+     IV      THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
+     V       MIRIAM'S STUDIO
+     VI      THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE
+     VII     BEATRICE
+     VIII    THE SUBURBAN VILLA
+     IX      THE FAUN AND NYMPH
+     X       THE SYLVAN DANCE
+     XI      FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
+     XII     A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
+     XIII    A SCULPTOR'S STUDIO
+     XIV     CLEOPATRA
+     XV      AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
+     XVI     A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
+     XVII    MIRIAM'S TROUBLE
+     XVIII   ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
+     XIX     THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
+     XX      THE BURIAL CHANT
+     XXI     THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
+     XXII    THE MEDICI GARDENS
+     XXIII   MIRIAM AND HILDA
+
+
+     Volume II
+
+     XXIV    THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES
+     XXV     SUNSHINE
+     XXVI    THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI
+     XXVII   MYTHS
+     XXVIII  THE OWL TOWER
+     XXIX    ON THE BATTLEMENTS
+     XXX     DONATELLO'S BUST
+     XXXI    THE MARBLE SALOON
+     XXXII   SCENES BY THE WAY
+     XXXIII  PICTURED WINDOWS
+     XXXIV   MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA
+     XXXV    THE BRONZE PONTIFF'S BENEDICTION
+     XXXVI   HILDA'S TOWER
+     XXXVII  THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES
+     XXXVIII ALTARS AND INCENSE
+     XXXIX   THE WORLD'S CATHEDRAL
+     XL      HILDA AND A FRIEND
+     XLI     SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS
+     XLII    REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM
+     XLIII   THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP
+     XLIV    THE DESERTED SHRINE
+     XLV     THE FLIGHT OF HILDA'S DOVES
+     XLVI    A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA
+     XLVII   THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA
+     XLVIII  A SCENE IN THE CORSO
+     XLIX    A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL
+     L       MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
+
+
+
+
+THE MARBLE FAUN
+
+Volume I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
+
+
+Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest
+the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the
+sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first,
+after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble
+and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his
+death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian
+Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still
+shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life,
+although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps
+corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here,
+likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand
+years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close
+at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom,
+but assaulted by a snake.
+
+From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad
+stone steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of
+the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus,
+right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate
+Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing
+over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with
+ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches,
+built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very
+pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond--yet but a little
+way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening
+space--rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky
+brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut
+in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay
+and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half finished
+wall.
+
+We glance hastily at these things,--at this bright sky, and those
+blue distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian,
+venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous
+statues in the saloon,--in the hope of putting the reader into that
+state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague
+sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density
+in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present
+moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and
+interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. Viewed through this
+medium, our narrative--into which are woven some airy and unsubstantial
+threads, intermixed with others, twisted out of the commonest stuff of
+human existence--may seem not widely different from the texture of all
+our lives.
+
+Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we
+handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.
+
+It might be that the four persons whom we are seeking to introduce were
+conscious of this dreamy character of the present, as compared with the
+square blocks of granite wherewith the Romans built their lives. Perhaps
+it even contributed to the fanciful merriment which was just now their
+mood. When we find ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities, it
+seems hardly worth while to be sad, but rather to laugh as gayly as we
+may, and ask little reason wherefore.
+
+Of these four friends of ours, three were artists, or connected with
+art; and, at this moment, they had been simultaneously struck by a
+resemblance between one of the antique statues, a well-known masterpiece
+of Grecian sculpture, and a young Italian, the fourth member of their
+party.
+
+"You must needs confess, Kenyon," said a dark-eyed young woman, whom
+her friends called Miriam, "that you never chiselled out of marble, nor
+wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker
+as you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character,
+sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be
+half illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a
+substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement.
+Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is it not true,
+Hilda?"
+
+"Not quite--almost--yes, I really think so," replied Hilda, a slender,
+brown-haired, New England girl, whose perceptions of form and expression
+were wonderfully clear and delicate. "If there is any difference between
+the two faces, the reason may be, I suppose, that the Faun dwelt in
+woods and fields, and consorted with his like; whereas Donatello has
+known cities a little, and such people as ourselves. But the resemblance
+is very close, and very strange."
+
+"Not so strange," whispered Miriam mischievously; "for no Faun in
+Arcadia was ever a greater simpleton than Donatello. He has hardly a
+man's share of wit, small as that may be. It is a pity there are no
+longer any of this congenial race of rustic creatures for our friend to
+consort with!"
+
+"Hush, naughty one!" returned Hilda. "You are very ungrateful, for you
+well know he has wit enough to worship you, at all events."
+
+"Then the greater fool he!" said Miriam so bitterly that Hilda's quiet
+eyes were somewhat startled.
+
+"Donatello, my dear friend," said Kenyon, in Italian, "pray gratify us
+all by taking the exact attitude of this statue."
+
+The young man laughed, and threw himself into the position in which
+the statue has been standing for two or three thousand years. In truth,
+allowing for the difference of costume, and if a lion's skin could have
+been substituted for his modern talma, and a rustic pipe for his stick,
+Donatello might have figured perfectly as the marble Faun, miraculously
+softened into flesh and blood.
+
+"Yes; the resemblance is wonderful," observed Kenyon, after examining
+the marble and the man with the accuracy of a sculptor's eye. "There
+is one point, however, or, rather, two points, in respect to which our
+friend Donatello's abundant curls will not permit us to say whether the
+likeness is carried into minute detail."
+
+And the sculptor directed the attention of the party to the ears of the
+beautiful statue which they were contemplating.
+
+But we must do more than merely refer to this exquisite work of art; it
+must be described, however inadequate may be the effort to express its
+magic peculiarity in words.
+
+The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on
+the trunk or stump of a tree; one hand hangs carelessly by his side;
+in the other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan
+instrument of music. His only garment--a lion's skin, with the claws
+upon his shoulder--falls halfway down his back, leaving the limbs
+and entire front of the figure nude. The form, thus displayed, is
+marvellously graceful, but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more
+flesh, and less of heroic muscle, than the old sculptors were wont to
+assign to their types of masculine beauty. The character of the face
+corresponds with the figure; it is most agreeable in outline and
+feature, but rounded and somewhat voluptuously developed, especially
+about the throat and chin; the nose is almost straight, but very
+slightly curves inward, thereby acquiring an indescribable charm of
+geniality and humor. The mouth, with its full yet delicate lips, seems
+so nearly to smile outright, that it calls forth a responsive smile. The
+whole statue--unlike anything else that ever was wrought in that severe
+material of marble--conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual creature,
+easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched
+by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone image without
+conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its substance were warm
+to the touch, and imbued with actual life. It comes very close to some
+of our pleasantest sympathies.
+
+Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high and heroic
+ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so delightful an
+object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human heart. The being
+here represented is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be
+incapable of comprehending such; but he would be true and honest by dint
+of his simplicity. We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for
+an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr's stuff in all that
+softened marble; but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment,
+and might act devotedly through its impulse, and even die for it at
+need. It is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the
+medium of his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature
+might eventually be thrown into the background, though never utterly
+expelled.
+
+The animal nature, indeed, is a most essential part of the Faun's
+composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation meet and
+combine with those of humanity in this strange yet true and natural
+conception of antique poetry and art. Praxiteles has subtly diffused
+throughout his work that mute mystery, which so hopelessly perplexes us
+whenever we attempt to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of
+the lower orders of creation. The riddle is indicated, however, only by
+two definite signs: these are the two ears of the Faun, which are leaf
+shaped, terminating in little peaks, like those of some species of
+animals. Though not so seen in the marble, they are probably to be
+considered as clothed in fine, downy fur. In the coarser representations
+of this class of mythological creatures, there is another token of brute
+kindred,--a certain caudal appendage; which, if the Faun of Praxiteles
+must be supposed to possess it at all, is hidden by the lion's skin that
+forms his garment. The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole
+indications of his wild, forest nature.
+
+Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the
+sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill--in a word, a sculptor
+and a poet too--could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and
+then have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in
+marble. Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being in whom
+both races meet on friendly ground. The idea grows coarse as we handle
+it, and hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over
+the statue, he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of
+sylvan life, all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that
+dwell in woods and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one
+substance, along with the kindred qualities in the human soul. Trees,
+grass, flowers, woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated
+man. The essence of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists,
+within that discolored marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles.
+
+And, after all, the idea may have been no dream, but rather a poet's
+reminiscence of a period when man's affinity with nature was more
+strict, and his fellowship with every living thing more intimate and
+dear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+THE FAUN
+
+
+"Donatello," playfully cried Miriam, "do not leave us in this perplexity!
+Shake aside those brown curls, my friend, and let us see whether this
+marvellous resemblance extends to the very tips of the ears. If so, we
+shall like you all the better!"
+
+"No, no, dearest signorina," answered Donatello, laughing, but with
+a certain earnestness. "I entreat you to take the tips of my ears for
+granted." As he spoke, the young Italian made a skip and jump, light
+enough for a veritable faun; so as to place himself quite beyond the
+reach of the fair hand that was outstretched, as if to settle the matter
+by actual examination. "I shall be like a wolf of the Apennines," he
+continued, taking his stand on the other side of the Dying Gladiator,
+"if you touch my ears ever so softly. None of my race could endure it.
+It has always been a tender point with my forefathers and me."
+
+He spoke in Italian, with the Tuscan rusticity of accent, and an
+unshaped sort of utterance, betokening that he must heretofore have been
+chiefly conversant with rural people.
+
+"Well, well," said Miriam, "your tender point--your two tender points,
+if you have them--shall be safe, so far as I am concerned. But how
+strange this likeness is, after all! and how delightful, if it really
+includes the pointed ears! O, it is impossible, of course," she
+continued, in English, "with a real and commonplace young man like
+Donatello; but you see how this peculiarity defines the position of
+the Faun; and, while putting him where he cannot exactly assert his
+brotherhood, still disposes us kindly towards the kindred creature. He
+is not supernatural, but just on the verge of nature, and yet within
+it. What is the nameless charm of this idea, Hilda? You can feel it more
+delicately than I."
+
+"It perplexes me," said Hilda thoughtfully, and shrinking a little;
+"neither do I quite like to think about it."
+
+"But, surely," said Kenyon, "you agree with Miriam and me that there is
+something very touching and impressive in this statue of the Faun. In
+some long-past age, he must really have existed. Nature needed, and
+still needs, this beautiful creature; standing betwixt man and animal,
+sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and
+interpreting the whole existence of one to the other. What a pity that
+he has forever vanished from the hard and dusty paths of life,--unless,"
+added the sculptor, in a sportive whisper, "Donatello be actually he!"
+
+"You cannot conceive how this fantasy takes hold of me," responded
+Miriam, between jest and earnest. "Imagine, now, a real being, similar
+to this mythic Faun; how happy, how genial, how satisfactory would be
+his life, enjoying the warm, sensuous, earthy side of nature; revelling
+in the merriment of woods and streams; living as our four-footed kindred
+do,--as mankind did in its innocent childhood; before sin, sorrow or
+morality itself had ever been thought of! Ah! Kenyon, if Hilda and you
+and I--if I, at least--had pointed ears! For I suppose the Faun had
+no conscience, no remorse, no burden on the heart, no troublesome
+recollections of any sort; no dark future either."
+
+"What a tragic tone was that last, Miriam!" said the sculptor;
+and, looking into her face, he was startled to behold it pale and
+tear-stained. "How suddenly this mood has come over you!"
+
+"Let it go as it came," said Miriam, "like a thunder-shower in this
+Roman sky. All is sunshine again, you see!"
+
+Donatello's refractoriness as regarded his ears had evidently cost him
+something, and he now came close to Miriam's side, gazing at her with an
+appealing air, as if to solicit forgiveness. His mute, helpless gesture
+of entreaty had something pathetic in it, and yet might well enough
+excite a laugh, so like it was to what you may see in the aspect of a
+hound when he thinks himself in fault or disgrace. It was difficult to
+make out the character of this young man. So full of animal life as
+he was, so joyous in his deportment, so handsome, so physically
+well-developed, he made no impression of incompleteness, of maimed or
+stinted nature. And yet, in social intercourse, these familiar friends
+of his habitually and instinctively allowed for him, as for a child or
+some other lawless thing, exacting no strict obedience to conventional
+rules, and hardly noticing his eccentricities enough to pardon them.
+There was an indefinable characteristic about Donatello that set him
+outside of rules.
+
+He caught Miriam's hand, kissed it, and gazed into her eyes without
+saying a word. She smiled, and bestowed on him a little careless caress,
+singularly like what one would give to a pet dog when he puts himself in
+the way to receive it. Not that it was so decided a caress either, but
+only the merest touch, somewhere between a pat and a tap of the finger;
+it might be a mark of fondness, or perhaps a playful pretence of
+punishment. At all events, it appeared to afford Donatello exquisite
+pleasure; insomuch that he danced quite round the wooden railing that
+fences in the Dying Gladiator.
+
+"It is the very step of the Dancing Faun," said Miriam, apart, to Hilda.
+"What a child, or what a simpleton, he is! I continually find myself
+treating Donatello as if he were the merest unfledged chicken; and yet
+he can claim no such privileges in the right of his tender age, for he
+is at least--how old should you think him, Hilda?"
+
+"Twenty years, perhaps," replied Hilda, glancing at Donatello; "but,
+indeed, I cannot tell; hardly so old, on second thoughts, or possibly
+older. He has nothing to do with time, but has a look of eternal youth
+in his face."
+
+"All underwitted people have that look," said Miriam scornfully.
+
+"Donatello has certainly the gift of eternal youth, as Hilda suggests,"
+observed Kenyon, laughing; "for, judging by the date of this statue,
+which, I am more and more convinced, Praxiteles carved on purpose for
+him, he must be at least twenty-five centuries old, and he still looks
+as young as ever."
+
+"What age have you, Donatello?" asked Miriam.
+
+"Signorina, I do not know," he answered; "no great age, however; for I
+have only lived since I met you."
+
+"Now, what old man of society could have turned a silly compliment more
+smartly than that!" exclaimed Miriam. "Nature and art are just at one
+sometimes. But what a happy ignorance is this of our friend Donatello!
+Not to know his own age! It is equivalent to being immortal on earth. If
+I could only forget mine!"
+
+"It is too soon to wish that," observed the sculptor; "you are scarcely
+older than Donatello looks."
+
+"I shall be content, then," rejoined Miriam, "if I could only forget
+one day of all my life." Then she seemed to repent of this allusion, and
+hastily added, "A woman's days are so tedious that it is a boon to leave
+even one of them out of the account."
+
+The foregoing conversation had been carried on in a mood in which all
+imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to indulge. In this
+frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side
+with the idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without
+distinguishing which is the most valuable, or assigning any considerable
+value to either. The resemblance between the marble Faun and their
+living companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression
+on these three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region,
+lifting up, as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy
+earthly feet from the actual soil of life. The world had been set
+afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long,
+of all customary responsibility for what they thought and said.
+
+It might be under this influence--or, perhaps, because sculptors always
+abuse one another's works--that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the
+Dying Gladiator.
+
+"I used to admire this statue exceedingly," he remarked, "but, latterly,
+I find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be such a
+length of time leaning on his arm in the very act of death. If he is so
+terribly hurt, why does he not sink down and die without further ado?
+Flitting moments, imminent emergencies, imperceptible intervals between
+two breaths, ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of
+marble; in any sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill,
+since there must of necessity be a physical one. Otherwise, it is
+like flinging a block of marble up into the air, and, by some trick of
+enchantment, causing it to stick there. You feel that it ought to come
+down, and are dissatisfied that it does not obey the natural law."
+
+"I see," said Miriam mischievously, "you think that sculpture should
+be a sort of fossilizing process. But, in truth, your frozen art has
+nothing like the scope and freedom of Hilda's and mine. In painting
+there is no similar objection to the representation of brief snatches
+of time,--perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told in
+picture, and buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch.
+For instance, a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of
+his far antiquity, lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his
+simple heart warm."
+
+"Ah, the Faun!" cried Hilda, with a little gesture of impatience; "I
+have been looking at him too long; and now, instead of a beautiful
+statue, immortally young, I see only a corroded and discolored stone.
+This change is very apt to occur in statues."
+
+"And a similar one in pictures, surely," retorted the sculptor. "It is
+the spectator's mood that transfigures the Transfiguration itself.
+I defy any painter to move and elevate me without my own consent and
+assistance."
+
+"Then you are deficient of a sense," said Miriam.
+
+The party now strayed onward from hall to hall of that rich gallery,
+pausing here and there, to look at the multitude of noble and lovely
+shapes, which have been dug up out of the deep grave in which old Rome
+lies buried. And still, the realization of the antique Faun, in the
+person of Donatello, gave a more vivid character to all these marble
+ghosts. Why should not each statue grow warm with life! Antinous might
+lift his brow, and tell us why he is forever sad. The Lycian Apollo
+might strike his lyre; and, at the first vibration, that other Faun in
+red marble, who keeps up a motionless dance, should frisk gayly forth,
+leading yonder Satyrs, with shaggy goat-shanks, to clatter their little
+hoofs upon the floor, and all join hands with Donatello! Bacchus, too,
+a rosy flush diffusing itself over his time-stained surface, could
+come down from his pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to
+Donatello's lips; because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf
+who so often shared his revels. And here, in this sarcophagus, the
+exquisitely carved figures might assume life, and chase one another
+round its verge with that wild merriment which is so strangely
+represented on those old burial coffers: though still with some subtile
+allusion to death, carefully veiled, but forever peeping forth amid
+emblems of mirth and riot.
+
+As the four friends descended the stairs, however, their play of fancy
+subsided into a much more sombre mood; a result apt to follow upon such
+exhilaration as that which had so recently taken possession of them.
+
+"Do you know," said Miriam confidentially to Hilda, "I doubt the reality
+of this likeness of Donatello to the Faun, which we have been talking so
+much about? To say the truth, it never struck me so forcibly as it did
+Kenyon and yourself, though I gave in to whatever you were pleased to
+fancy, for the sake of a moment's mirth and wonder." "I was certainly
+in earnest, and you seemed equally so," replied Hilda, glancing back
+at Donatello, as if to reassure herself of the resemblance. "But faces
+change so much, from hour to hour, that the same set of features has
+often no keeping with itself; to an eye, at least, which looks at
+expression more than outline. How sad and sombre he has grown all of a
+sudden!" "Angry too, methinks! nay, it is anger much more than sadness,"
+said Miriam. "I have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before.
+If you consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of
+the bulldog, or some other equally fierce brute, in our friend's
+composition; a trait of savageness hardly to be expected in such a
+gentle creature as he usually is. Donatello is a very strange young man.
+I wish he would not haunt my footsteps so continually."
+
+"You have bewitched the poor lad," said the sculptor, laughing. "You
+have a faculty of bewitching people, and it is providing you with a
+singular train of followers. I see another of them behind yonder pillar;
+and it is his presence that has aroused Donatello's wrath."
+
+They had now emerged from the gateway of the palace; and partly
+concealed by one of the pillars of the portico stood a figure such as
+may often be encountered in the streets and piazzas of Rome, and nowhere
+else. He looked as if he might just have stepped out of a picture, and,
+in truth, was likely enough to find his way into a dozen pictures; being
+no other than one of those living models, dark, bushy bearded, wild
+of aspect and attire, whom artists convert into saints or assassins,
+according as their pictorial purposes demand.
+
+"Miriam," whispered Hilda, a little startled, "it is your model!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
+
+
+Miriam's model has so important a connection with our story, that it is
+essential to describe the singular mode of his first appearance, and
+how he subsequently became a self-appointed follower of the young female
+artist. In the first place, however, we must devote a page or two to
+certain peculiarities in the position of Miriam herself.
+
+There was an ambiguity about this young lady, which, though it did not
+necessarily imply anything wrong, would have operated unfavorably as
+regarded her reception in society, anywhere but in Rome. The truth was,
+that nobody knew anything about Miriam, either for good or evil. She had
+made her appearance without introduction, had taken a studio, put her
+card upon the door, and showed very considerable talent as a painter in
+oils. Her fellow professors of the brush, it is true, showered abundant
+criticisms upon her pictures, allowing them to be well enough for the
+idle half-efforts of an amateur, but lacking both the trained skill and
+the practice that distinguish the works of a true artist.
+
+Nevertheless, be their faults what they might, Miriam's pictures met
+with good acceptance among the patrons of modern art. Whatever technical
+merit they lacked, its absence was more than supplied by a warmth
+and passionateness, which she had the faculty of putting into her
+productions, and which all the world could feel. Her nature had a great
+deal of color, and, in accordance with it, so likewise had her pictures.
+
+Miriam had great apparent freedom of intercourse; her manners were so
+far from evincing shyness, that it seemed easy to become acquainted with
+her, and not difficult to develop a casual acquaintance into intimacy.
+Such, at least, was the impression which she made, upon brief contact,
+but not such the ultimate conclusion of those who really sought to know
+her. So airy, free, and affable was Miriam's deportment towards all who
+came within her sphere, that possibly they might never be conscious of
+the fact, but so it was, that they did not get on, and were seldom any
+further advanced into her good graces to-day than yesterday. By some
+subtile quality, she kept people at a distance, without so much as
+letting them know that they were excluded from her inner circle. She
+resembled one of those images of light, which conjurers evoke and cause
+to shine before us, in apparent tangibility, only an arm's length beyond
+our grasp: we make a step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion,
+but find it still precisely so far out of our reach. Finally, society
+began to recognize the impossibility of getting nearer to Miriam, and
+gruffly acquiesced.
+
+There were two persons, however, whom she appeared to acknowledge as
+friends in the closer and truer sense of the word; and both of these
+more favored individuals did credit to Miriam's selection. One was
+a young American sculptor, of high promise and rapidly increasing
+celebrity; the other, a girl of the same country, a painter like Miriam
+herself, but in a widely different sphere of art. Her heart flowed out
+towards these two; she requited herself by their society and friendship
+(and especially by Hilda's) for all the loneliness with which, as
+regarded the rest of the world, she chose to be surrounded. Her two
+friends were conscious of the strong, yearning grasp which Miriam laid
+upon them, and gave her their affection in full measure; Hilda, indeed,
+responding with the fervency of a girl's first friendship, and Kenyon
+with a manly regard, in which there was nothing akin to what is
+distinctively called love.
+
+A sort of intimacy subsequently grew up between these three friends
+and a fourth individual; it was a young Italian, who, casually visiting
+Rome, had been attracted by the beauty which Miriam possessed in a
+remarkable degree. He had sought her, followed her, and insisted, with
+simple perseverance, upon being admitted at least to her acquaintance; a
+boon which had been granted, when a more artful character, seeking it by
+a more subtle mode of pursuit, would probably have failed to obtain it.
+This young man, though anything but intellectually brilliant, had many
+agreeable characteristics which won him the kindly and half-contemptuous
+regard of Miriam and her two friends. It was he whom they called
+Donatello, and whose wonderful resemblance to the Faun of Praxiteles
+forms the keynote of our narrative.
+
+Such was the position in which we find Miriam some few months after her
+establishment at Rome. It must be added, however, that the world did not
+permit her to hide her antecedents without making her the subject of
+a good deal of conjecture; as was natural enough, considering the
+abundance of her personal charms, and the degree of notice that she
+attracted as an artist. There were many stories about Miriam's origin
+and previous life, some of which had a very probable air, while others
+were evidently wild and romantic fables. We cite a few, leaving the
+reader to designate them either under the probable or the romantic head.
+
+It was said, for example, that Miriam was the daughter and heiress of
+a great Jewish banker (an idea perhaps suggested by a certain rich
+Oriental character in her face), and had fled from her paternal home
+to escape a union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden
+brotherhood; the object being to retain their vast accumulation of
+wealth within the family. Another story hinted that she was a German
+princess, whom, for reasons of state, it was proposed to give in
+marriage either to a decrepit sovereign, or a prince still in his
+cradle. According to a third statement, she was the off-spring of a
+Southern American planter, who had given her an elaborate education and
+endowed her with his wealth; but the one burning drop of African
+blood in her veins so affected her with a sense of ignominy, that she
+relinquished all and fled her country. By still another account she was
+the lady of an English nobleman; and, out of mere love and honor of
+art, had thrown aside the splendor of her rank, and come to seek a
+subsistence by her pencil in a Roman studio.
+
+In all the above cases, the fable seemed to be instigated by the large
+and bounteous impression which Miriam invariably made, as if necessity
+and she could have nothing to do with one another. Whatever deprivations
+she underwent must needs be voluntary. But there were other surmises,
+taking such a commonplace view as that Miriam was the daughter of a
+merchant or financier, who had been ruined in a great commercial crisis;
+and, possessing a taste for art, she had attempted to support herself by
+the pencil, in preference to the alternative of going out as governess.
+
+Be these things how they might, Miriam, fair as she looked, was plucked
+up out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her. She was a
+beautiful and attractive woman, but based, as it were, upon a cloud, and
+all surrounded with misty substance; so that the result was to render
+her sprite-like in her most ordinary manifestations. This was the case
+even in respect to Kenyon and Hilda, her especial friends. But such was
+the effect of Miriam's natural language, her generosity, kindliness, and
+native truth of character, that these two received her as a dear friend
+into their hearts, taking her good qualities as evident and genuine, and
+never imagining that what was hidden must be therefore evil.
+
+We now proceed with our narrative.
+
+The same party of friends, whom we have seen at the sculpture-gallery of
+the Capitol, chanced to have gone together, some months before, to the
+catacomb of St. Calixtus. They went joyously down into that vast
+tomb, and wandered by torchlight through a sort of dream, in which
+reminiscences of church aisles and grimy cellars--and chiefly the
+latter--seemed to be broken into fragments, and hopelessly intermingled.
+The intricate passages along which they followed their guide had been
+hewn, in some forgotten age, out of a dark-red, crumbly stone. On either
+side were horizontal niches, where, if they held their torches closely,
+the shape of a human body was discernible in white ashes, into which the
+entire mortality of a man or woman had resolved itself. Among all this
+extinct dust, there might perchance be a thigh-bone, which crumbled at
+a touch; or possibly a skull, grinning at its own wretched plight, as is
+the ugly and empty habit of the thing.
+
+Sometimes their gloomy pathway tended upward, so that, through a
+crevice, a little daylight glimmered down upon them, or even a streak of
+sunshine peeped into a burial niche; then again, they went downward by
+gradual descent, or by abrupt, rudely hewn steps, into deeper and deeper
+recesses of the earth. Here and there the narrow and tortuous passages
+widened somewhat, developing themselves into small chapels;--which
+once, no doubt, had been adorned with marble-work and lighted with
+ever-burning lamps and tapers. All such illumination and ornament,
+however, had long since been extinguished and stript away; except,
+indeed, that the low roofs of a few of these ancient sites of worship
+were covered with dingy stucco, and frescoed with scriptural scenes and
+subjects, in the dreariest stage of ruin.
+
+In one such chapel, the guide showed them a low arch, beneath which the
+body of St. Cecilia had been buried after her martyrdom, and where it
+lay till a sculptor saw it, and rendered it forever beautiful in marble.
+
+In a similar spot they found two sarcophagi, one containing a skeleton,
+and the other a shrivelled body, which still wore the garments of its
+former lifetime.
+
+"How dismal all this is!" said Hilda, shuddering. "I do not know why we
+came here, nor why we should stay a moment longer."
+
+"I hate it all!" cried Donatello with peculiar energy. "Dear friends,
+let us hasten back into the blessed daylight!"
+
+From the first, Donatello had shown little fancy for the expedition;
+for, like most Italians, and in especial accordance with the law of his
+own simple and physically happy nature, this young man had an infinite
+repugnance to graves and skulls, and to all that ghastliness which the
+Gothic mind loves to associate with the idea of death. He shuddered,
+and looked fearfully round, drawing nearer to Miriam, whose attractive
+influence alone had enticed him into that gloomy region.
+
+"What a child you are, poor Donatello!" she observed, with the freedom
+which she always used towards him. "You are afraid of ghosts!"
+
+"Yes, signorina; terribly afraid!" said the truthful Donatello.
+
+"I also believe in ghosts," answered Miriam, "and could tremble at them,
+in a suitable place. But these sepulchres are so old, and these skulls
+and white ashes so very dry, that methinks they have ceased to be
+haunted. The most awful idea connected with the catacombs is their
+interminable extent, and the possibility of going astray into this
+labyrinth of darkness, which broods around the little glimmer of our
+tapers."
+
+"Has any one ever been lost here?" asked Kenyon of the guide.
+
+"Surely, signor; one, no longer ago than my father's time," said the
+guide; and he added, with the air of a man who believed what he was
+telling, "but the first that went astray here was a pagan of old Rome,
+who hid himself in order to spy out and betray the blessed saints, who
+then dwelt and worshipped in these dismal places. You have heard the
+story, signor? A miracle was wrought upon the accursed one; and, ever
+since (for fifteen centuries at least), he has been groping in the
+darkness, seeking his way out of the catacomb."
+
+"Has he ever been seen?" asked Hilda, who had great and tremulous faith
+in marvels of this kind.
+
+"These eyes of mine never beheld him, signorina; the saints forbid!"
+answered the guide. "But it is well known that he watches near parties
+that come into the catacomb, especially if they be heretics, hoping to
+lead some straggler astray. What this lost wretch pines for, almost as
+much as for the blessed sunshine, is a companion to be miserable with
+him."
+
+"Such an intense desire for sympathy indicates something amiable in the
+poor fellow, at all events," observed Kenyon.
+
+They had now reached a larger chapel than those heretofore seen; it
+was of a circular shape, and, though hewn out of the solid mass of red
+sandstone, had pillars, and a carved roof, and other tokens of a regular
+architectural design. Nevertheless, considered as a church, it was
+exceedingly minute, being scarcely twice a man's stature in height, and
+only two or three paces from wall to wall; and while their collected
+torches illuminated this one small, consecrated spot, the great darkness
+spread all round it, like that immenser mystery which envelops our
+little life, and into which friends vanish from us, one by one. "Why,
+where is Miriam?" cried Hilda. The party gazed hurriedly from face to
+face, and became aware that one of their party had vanished into
+the great darkness, even while they were shuddering at the remote
+possibility of such a misfortune.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
+
+
+"Surely, she cannot be lost!" exclaimed Kenyon. "It is but a moment since
+she was speaking."
+
+"No, no!" said Hilda, in great alarm. "She was behind us all; and it is
+a long while since we have heard her voice!"
+
+"Torches! torches!" cried Donatello desperately. "I will seek her, be
+the darkness ever so dismal!"
+
+But the guide held him back, and assured them all that there was no
+possibility of assisting their lost companion, unless by shouting at
+the very top of their voices. As the sound would go very far along these
+close and narrow passages, there was a fair probability that Miriam
+might hear the call, and be able to retrace her steps.
+
+Accordingly, they all--Kenyon with his bass voice; Donatello with his
+tenor; the guide with that high and hard Italian cry, which makes the
+streets of Rome so resonant; and Hilda with her slender scream, piercing
+farther than the united uproar of the rest--began to shriek, halloo, and
+bellow, with the utmost force of their lungs. And, not to prolong the
+reader's suspense (for we do not particularly seek to interest him
+in this scene, telling it only on account of the trouble and strange
+entanglement which followed), they soon heard a responsive call, in a
+female voice.
+
+"It was the signorina!" cried Donatello joyfully.
+
+"Yes; it was certainly dear Miriam's voice," said Hilda. "And here she
+comes! Thank Heaven! Thank Heaven!"
+
+The figure of their friend was now discernible by her own torchlight,
+approaching out of one of the cavernous passages. Miriam came forward,
+but not with the eagerness and tremulous joy of a fearful girl, just
+rescued from a labyrinth of gloomy mystery. She made no immediate
+response to their inquiries and tumultuous congratulations; and, as they
+afterwards remembered, there was something absorbed, thoughtful, and
+self-concentrated in her deportment. She looked pale, as well she might,
+and held her torch with a nervous grasp, the tremor of which was seen
+in the irregular twinkling of the flame. This last was the chief
+perceptible sign of any recent agitation or alarm.
+
+"Dearest, dearest Miriam," exclaimed Hilda, throwing her arms about her
+friend, "where have you been straying from us? Blessed be Providence,
+which has rescued you out of that miserable darkness!"
+
+"Hush, dear Hilda!" whispered Miriam, with a strange little laugh. "Are
+you quite sure that it was Heaven's guidance which brought me back?
+If so, it was by an odd messenger, as you will confess. See; there he
+stands."
+
+Startled at Miriam's words and manner, Hilda gazed into the duskiness
+whither she pointed, and there beheld a figure standing just on the
+doubtful limit of obscurity, at the threshold of the small, illuminated
+chapel. Kenyon discerned him at the same instant, and drew nearer with
+his torch; although the guide attempted to dissuade him, averring that,
+once beyond the consecrated precincts of the chapel, the apparition
+would have power to tear him limb from limb. It struck the sculptor,
+however, when he afterwards recurred to these circumstances, that the
+guide manifested no such apprehension on his own account as he professed
+on behalf of others; for he kept pace with Kenyon as the latter
+approached the figure, though still endeavoring to restrain 'him.
+
+In fine, they both drew near enough to get as good a view of the spectre
+as the smoky light of their torches, struggling with the massive gloom,
+could supply.
+
+The stranger was of exceedingly picturesque, and even melodramatic
+aspect. He was clad in a voluminous cloak, that seemed to be made of a
+buffalo's hide, and a pair of those goat-skin breeches, with the hair
+outward, which are still commonly worn by the peasants of the Roman
+Campagna. In this garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth,
+the Spectre of the Catacomb might have represented the last survivor
+of that vanished race, hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning
+over his lost life of woods and streams.
+
+Furthermore, he had on a broad-brimmed, conical hat, beneath the shadow
+of which a wild visage was indistinctly seen, floating away, as it were,
+into a dusky wilderness of mustache and beard. His eyes winked, and
+turned uneasily from the torches, like a creature to whom midnight would
+be more congenial than noonday.
+
+On the whole, the spectre might have made a considerable impression
+on the sculptor's nerves, only that he was in the habit of observing
+similar figures, almost every day, reclining on the Spanish steps,
+and waiting for some artist to invite them within the magic realm of
+picture. Nor, even thus familiarized with the stranger's peculiarities
+of appearance, could Kenyon help wondering to see such a personage,
+shaping himself so suddenly out of the void darkness of the catacomb.
+
+"What are you?" said the sculptor, advancing his torch nearer. "And how
+long have you been wandering here?"
+
+"A thousand and five hundred years!" muttered the guide, loud enough to
+be heard by all the party. "It is the old pagan phantom that I told you
+of, who sought to betray the blessed saints!"
+
+"Yes; it is a phantom!" cried Donatello, with a shudder. "Ah, dearest
+signorina, what a fearful thing has beset you in those dark corridors!"
+
+"Nonsense, Donatello," said the sculptor. "The man is no more a phantom
+than yourself. The only marvel is, how he comes to be hiding himself in
+the catacomb. Possibly our guide might solve the riddle."
+
+The spectre himself here settled the point of his tangibility, at all
+events, and physical substance, by approaching a step nearer, and laying
+his hand on Kenyon's arm.
+
+"Inquire not what I am, nor wherefore I abide in the darkness," said he,
+in a hoarse, harsh voice, as if a great deal of damp were clustering in
+his throat. "Henceforth, I am nothing but a shadow behind her footsteps.
+She came to me when I sought her not. She has called me forth, and must
+abide the consequences of my reappearance in the world."
+
+"Holy Virgin! I wish the signorina joy of her prize," said the guide,
+half to himself. "And in any case, the catacomb is well rid of him."
+
+We need follow the scene no further. So much is essential to the
+subsequent narrative, that, during the short period while astray in
+those tortuous passages, Miriam had encountered an unknown man, and
+led him forth with her, or was guided back by him, first into the
+torchlight, thence into the sunshine.
+
+It was the further singularity of this affair, that the connection, thus
+briefly and casually formed, did not terminate with the incident
+that gave it birth. As if her service to him, or his service to her,
+whichever it might be, had given him an indefeasible claim on Miriam's
+regard and protection, the Spectre of the Catacomb never long allowed
+her to lose sight of him, from that day forward. He haunted her
+footsteps with more than the customary persistency of Italian
+mendicants, when once they have recognized a benefactor. For days
+together, it is true, he occasionally vanished, but always reappeared,
+gliding after her through the narrow streets, or climbing the hundred
+steps of her staircase and sitting at her threshold.
+
+Being often admitted to her studio, he left his features, or some shadow
+or reminiscence of them, in many of her sketches and pictures. The moral
+atmosphere of these productions was thereby so influenced, that rival
+painters pronounced it a case of hopeless mannerism, which would destroy
+all Miriam's prospects of true excellence in art.
+
+The story of this adventure spread abroad, and made its way beyond
+the usual gossip of the Forestieri, even into Italian circles, where,
+enhanced by a still potent spirit of superstition, it grew far more
+wonderful than as above recounted. Thence, it came back among the
+Anglo-Saxons, and was communicated to the German artists, who so richly
+supplied it with romantic ornaments and excrescences, after their
+fashion, that it became a fantasy worthy of Tieck or Hoffmann. For
+nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a
+marvellous tale.
+
+The most reasonable version of the incident, that could anywise be
+rendered acceptable to the auditors, was substantially the one suggested
+by the guide of the catacomb, in his allusion to the legend of Memmius.
+This man, or demon, or man-demon, was a spy during the persecutions
+of the early Christians, probably under the Emperor Diocletian, and
+penetrated into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, with the malignant purpose
+of tracing out the hiding-places of the refugees. But, while he stole
+craftily through those dark corridors, he chanced to come upon a little
+chapel, where tapers were burning before an altar and a crucifix, and
+a priest was in the performance of his sacred office. By divine
+indulgence, there was a single moment's grace allowed to Memmius, during
+which, had he been capable of Christian faith and love, he might have
+knelt before the cross, and received the holy light into his soul, and
+so have been blest forever. But he resisted the sacred impulse. As
+soon, therefore, as that one moment had glided by, the light of the
+consecrated tapers, which represent all truth, bewildered the wretched
+man with everlasting error, and the blessed cross itself was stamped
+as a seal upon his heart, so that it should never open to receive
+conviction.
+
+Thenceforth, this heathen Memmius has haunted the wide and dreary
+precincts of the catacomb, seeking, as some say, to beguile new victims
+into his own misery; but, according to other statements, endeavoring to
+prevail on any unwary visitor to take him by the hand, and guide him out
+into the daylight. Should his wiles and entreaties take effect, however,
+the man-demon would remain only a little while above ground. He would
+gratify his fiendish malignity by perpetrating signal mischief on his
+benefactor, and perhaps bringing some old pestilence or other forgotten
+and long-buried evil on society; or, possibly, teaching the modern
+world some decayed and dusty kind of crime, which the antique Romans
+knew,--and then would hasten back to the catacomb, which, after so long
+haunting it, has grown his most congenial home.
+
+Miriam herself, with her chosen friends, the sculptor and the gentle
+Hilda, often laughed at the monstrous fictions that had gone abroad in
+reference to her adventure. Her two confidants (for such they were,
+on all ordinary subjects) had not failed to ask an explanation of the
+mystery, since undeniably a mystery there was, and one sufficiently
+perplexing in itself, without any help from the imaginative faculty.
+And, sometimes responding to their inquiries with a melancholy sort of
+playfulness, Miriam let her fancy run off into wilder fables than any
+which German ingenuity or Italian superstition had contrived.
+
+For example, with a strange air of seriousness over all her face, only
+belied by a laughing gleam in her dark eyes, she would aver that the
+spectre (who had been an artist in his mortal lifetime) had promised
+to teach her a long-lost, but invaluable secret of old Roman fresco
+painting. The knowledge of this process would place Miriam at the head
+of modern art; the sole condition being agreed upon, that she should
+return with him into his sightless gloom, after enriching a certain
+extent of stuccoed wall with the most brilliant and lovely designs. And
+what true votary of art would not purchase unrivalled excellence, even
+at so vast a sacrifice!
+
+Or, if her friends still solicited a soberer account, Miriam replied,
+that, meeting the old infidel in one of the dismal passages of the
+catacomb, she had entered into controversy with him, hoping to achieve
+the glory and satisfaction of converting him to the Christian faith. For
+the sake of so excellent a result; she had even staked her own salvation
+against his, binding herself to accompany him back into his penal gloom,
+if, within a twelvemonth's space, she should not have convinced him of
+the errors through which he had so long groped and stumbled. But, alas!
+up to the present time, the controversy had gone direfully in favor of
+the man-demon; and Miriam (as she whispered in Hilda's ear) had awful
+forebodings, that, in a few more months, she must take an eternal
+farewell of the sun!
+
+It was somewhat remarkable that all her romantic fantasies arrived at
+this self-same dreary termination,--it appeared impossible for her even
+to imagine any other than a disastrous result from her connection with
+her ill-omened attendant.
+
+This singularity might have meant nothing, however, had it not suggested
+a despondent state of mind, which was likewise indicated by many other
+tokens. Miriam's friends had no difficulty in perceiving that, in
+one way or another, her happiness was very seriously compromised. Her
+spirits were often depressed into deep melancholy. If ever she was gay,
+it was seldom with a healthy cheerfulness. She grew moody, moreover, and
+subject to fits of passionate ill temper; which usually wreaked itself
+on the heads of those who loved her best. Not that Miriam's indifferent
+acquaintances were safe from similar outbreaks of her displeasure,
+especially if they ventured upon any allusion to the model. In such
+cases, they were left with little disposition to renew the subject, but
+inclined, on the other hand, to interpret the whole matter as much to
+her discredit as the least favorable coloring of the facts would allow.
+
+It may occur to the reader, that there was really no demand for so much
+rumor and speculation in regard to an incident, Which might well enough
+have been explained without going many steps beyond the limits of
+probability. The spectre might have been merely a Roman beggar, whose
+fraternity often harbor in stranger shelters than the catacombs; or one
+of those pilgrims, who still journey from remote countries to kneel
+and worship at the holy sites, among which these haunts of the early
+Christians are esteemed especially sacred. Or, as was perhaps a more
+plausible theory, he might be a thief of the city, a robber of the
+Campagna, a political offender, or an assassin, with blood upon his
+hand; whom the negligence or connivance of the police allowed to take
+refuge in those subterranean fastnesses, where such outlaws have been
+accustomed to hide themselves from a far antiquity downward. Or he might
+have been a lunatic, fleeing instinctively from man, and making it his
+dark pleasure to dwell among the tombs, like him whose awful cry echoes
+afar to us from Scripture times.
+
+And, as for the stranger's attaching himself so devotedly to Miriam, her
+personal magnetism might be allowed a certain weight in the explanation.
+For what remains, his pertinacity need not seem so very singular to
+those who consider how slight a link serves to connect these vagabonds
+of idle Italy with any person that may have the ill-hap to bestow
+charity, or be otherwise serviceable to them, or betray the slightest
+interest in their fortunes.
+
+Thus little would remain to be accounted for, except the deportment of
+Miriam herself; her reserve, her brooding melancholy, her petulance,
+and moody passion. If generously interpreted, even these morbid symptoms
+might have sufficient cause in the stimulating and exhaustive influences
+of imaginative art, exercised by a delicate young woman, in the nervous
+and unwholesome atmosphere of Rome. Such, at least, was the view of the
+case which Hilda and Kenyon endeavored to impress on their own minds,
+and impart to those whom their opinions might influence.
+
+One of Miriam's friends took the matter sadly to heart. This was the
+young Italian. Donatello, as we have seen, had been an eyewitness of
+the stranger's first appearance, and had ever since nourished a singular
+prejudice against the mysterious, dusky, death-scented apparition.
+It resembled not so much a human dislike or hatred, as one of those
+instinctive, unreasoning antipathies which the lower animals sometimes
+display, and which generally prove more trustworthy than the acutest
+insight into character. The shadow of the model, always flung into the
+light which Miriam diffused around her, caused no slight trouble to
+Donatello. Yet he was of a nature so remarkably genial and joyous, so
+simply happy, that he might well afford to have something subtracted
+from his comfort, and make tolerable shift to live upon what remained.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+MIRIAM'S STUDIO
+
+
+The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago
+are a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more
+than many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass
+through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and
+perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round
+the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn
+fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts
+that have invariably lost what it might be well if living men could lay
+aside in that unfragrant atmosphere--the nose. Bas-reliefs, the spoil of
+some far older palace, are set in the surrounding walls, every stone of
+which has been ravished from the Coliseum, or any other imperial ruin
+which earlier barbarism had not already levelled with the earth. Between
+two of the pillars, moreover, stands an old sarcophagus without its
+lid, and with all its more prominently projecting sculptures broken
+off; perhaps it once held famous dust, and the bony framework of some
+historic man, although now only a receptacle for the rubbish of the
+courtyard, and a half-worn broom.
+
+In the centre of the court, under the blue Italian sky, and with the
+hundred windows of the vast palace gazing down upon it from four sides,
+appears a fountain. It brims over from one stone basin to another,
+or gushes from a Naiad's urn, or spurts its many little jets from the
+mouths of nameless monsters, which were merely grotesque and artificial
+when Bernini, or whoever was their unnatural father, first produced
+them; but now the patches of moss, the tufts of grass, the trailing
+maiden-hair, and all sorts of verdant weeds that thrive in the cracks
+and crevices of moist marble, tell us that Nature takes the fountain
+back into her great heart, and cherishes it as kindly as if it were a
+woodland spring. And hark, the pleasant murmur, the gurgle, the plash!
+You might hear just those tinkling sounds from any tiny waterfall in the
+forest, though here they gain a delicious pathos from the stately
+echoes that reverberate their natural language. So the fountain is not
+altogether glad, after all its three centuries at play!
+
+In one of the angles of the courtyard, a pillared doorway gives access
+to the staircase, with its spacious breadth of low marble steps, up
+which, in former times, have gone the princes and cardinals of the great
+Roman family who built this palace. Or they have come down, with still
+grander and loftier mien, on their way to the Vatican or the Quirinal,
+there to put off their scarlet hats in exchange for the triple crown.
+But, in fine, all these illustrious personages have gone down
+their hereditary staircase for the last time, leaving it to be the
+thoroughfare of ambassadors, English noblemen, American millionnaires,
+artists, tradesmen, washerwomen, and people of every degree,--all of
+whom find such gilded and marble-panelled saloons as their pomp and
+luxury demand, or such homely garrets as their necessity can pay for,
+within this one multifarious abode. Only, in not a single nook of the
+palace (built for splendor, and the accommodation of a vast retinue, but
+with no vision of a happy fireside or any mode of domestic enjoyment)
+does the humblest or the haughtiest occupant find comfort.
+
+Up such a staircase, on the morning after the scene at the sculpture
+gallery, sprang the light foot of Donatello. He ascended from story
+to story, passing lofty doorways, set within rich frames of sculptured
+marble, and climbing unweariedly upward, until the glories of the first
+piano and the elegance of the middle height were exchanged for a sort of
+Alpine region, cold and naked in its aspect. Steps of rough stone, rude
+wooden balustrades, a brick pavement in the passages, a dingy whitewash
+on the walls; these were here the palatial features. Finally, he paused
+before an oaken door, on which was pinned a card, bearing the name of
+Miriam Schaefer, artist in oils. Here Donatello knocked, and the door
+immediately fell somewhat ajar; its latch having been pulled up by means
+of a string on the inside. Passing through a little anteroom, he found
+himself in Miriam's presence.
+
+"Come in, wild Faun," she said, "and tell me the latest news from
+Arcady!"
+
+The artist was not just then at her easel, but was busied with the
+feminine task of mending a pair of gloves.
+
+There is something extremely pleasant, and even touching,--at least,
+of very sweet, soft, and winning effect,--in this peculiarity of
+needlework, distinguishing women from men. Our own sex is incapable of
+any such by-play aside from the main business of life; but women--be
+they of what earthly rank they may, however gifted with intellect or
+genius, or endowed with awful beauty--have always some little handiwork
+ready to fill the tiny gap of every vacant moment. A needle is familiar
+to the fingers of them all. A queen, no doubt, plies it on occasion; the
+woman poet can use it as adroitly as her pen; the woman's eye, that has
+discovered a new star, turns from its glory to send the polished little
+instrument gleaming along the hem of her kerchief, or to darn a casual
+fray in her dress. And they have greatly the advantage of us in this
+respect. The slender thread of silk or cotton keeps them united with
+the small, familiar, gentle interests of life, the continually operating
+influences of which do so much for the health of the character, and
+carry off what would otherwise be a dangerous accumulation of morbid
+sensibility. A vast deal of human sympathy runs along this electric
+line, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humblest
+seamstress, and keeping high and low in a species of communion with
+their kindred beings. Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle
+characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love
+to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts
+than while so occupied.
+
+And when the work falls in a woman's lap, of its own accord, and the
+needle involuntarily ceases to fly, it is a sign of trouble, quite as
+trustworthy as the throb of the heart itself. This was what happened
+to Miriam. Even while Donatello stood gazing at her, she seemed to have
+forgotten his presence, allowing him to drop out of her thoughts, and
+the torn glove to fall from her idle fingers. Simple as he was, the
+young man knew by his sympathies that something was amiss.
+
+"Dear lady, you are sad," said he, drawing close to her.
+
+"It is nothing, Donatello," she replied, resuming her work; "yes;
+a little sad, perhaps; but that is not strange for us people of the
+ordinary world, especially for women. You are of a cheerfuller race, my
+friend, and know nothing of this disease of sadness. But why do you come
+into this shadowy room of mine?"
+
+"Why do you make it so shadowy?" asked he.
+
+"We artists purposely exclude sunshine, and all but a partial light,"
+said Miriam, "because we think it necessary to put ourselves at
+odds with Nature before trying to imitate her. That strikes you very
+strangely, does it not? But we make very pretty pictures sometimes with
+our artfully arranged lights and shadows. Amuse yourself with some
+of mine, Donatello, and by and by I shall be in the mood to begin the
+portrait we were talking about."
+
+The room had the customary aspect of a painter's studio; one of those
+delightful spots that hardly seem to belong to the actual world, but
+rather to be the outward type of a poet's haunted imagination, where
+there are glimpses, sketches, and half-developed hints of beings and
+objects grander and more beautiful than we can anywhere find in reality.
+The windows were closed with shutters, or deeply curtained, except one,
+which was partly open to a sunless portion of the sky, admitting only
+from high upward that partial light which, with its strongly marked
+contrast of shadow, is the first requisite towards seeing objects
+pictorially. Pencil-drawings were pinned against the wall or scattered
+on the tables. Unframed canvases turned their backs on the spectator,
+presenting only a blank to the eye, and churlishly concealing whatever
+riches of scenery or human beauty Miriam's skill had depicted on the
+other side.
+
+In the obscurest part of the room Donatello was half startled at
+perceiving duskily a woman with long dark hair, who threw up her arms
+with a wild gesture of tragic despair, and appeared to beckon him into
+the darkness along with her.
+
+"Do not be afraid, Donatello," said Miriam, smiling to see him peering
+doubtfully into the mysterious dusk. "She means you no mischief, nor
+could perpetrate any if she wished it ever so much. It is a lady of
+exceedingly pliable disposition; now a heroine of romance, and now a
+rustic maid; yet all for show; being created, indeed, on purpose to wear
+rich shawls and other garments in a becoming fashion. This is the true
+end of her being, although she pretends to assume the most varied duties
+and perform many parts in life, while really the poor puppet has nothing
+on earth to do. Upon my word, I am satirical unawares, and seem to be
+describing nine women out of ten in the person of my lay-figure. For
+most purposes she has the advantage of the sisterhood. Would I were like
+her!"
+
+"How it changes her aspect," exclaimed Donatello, "to know that she is
+but a jointed figure! When my eyes first fell upon her, I thought her
+arms moved, as if beckoning me to help her in some direful peril."
+
+"Are you often troubled with such sinister freaks of fancy?" asked
+Miriam. "I should not have supposed it."
+
+"To tell you the truth, dearest signorina," answered the young Italian,
+"I am apt to be fearful in old, gloomy houses, and in the dark. I love
+no dark or dusky corners, except it be in a grotto, or among the thick
+green leaves of an arbor, or in some nook of the woods, such as I know
+many in the neighborhood of my home. Even there, if a stray sunbeam
+steal in, the shadow is all the better for its cheerful glimmer."
+
+"Yes; you are a Faun, you know," said the fair artist, laughing at the
+remembrance of the scene of the day before. "But the world is sadly
+changed nowadays; grievously changed, poor Donatello, since those happy
+times when your race used to dwell in the Arcadian woods, playing hide
+and seek with the nymphs in grottoes and nooks of shrubbery. You have
+reappeared on earth some centuries too late."
+
+"I do not understand you now," answered Donatello, looking perplexed;
+"only, signorina, I am glad to have my lifetime while you live; and
+where you are, be it in cities or fields, I would fain be there too."
+
+"I wonder whether I ought to allow you to speak in this way," said
+Miriam, looking thoughtfully at him. "Many young women would think it
+behooved them to be offended. Hilda would never let you speak so, I dare
+say. But he is a mere boy," she added, aside, "a simple boy, putting his
+boyish heart to the proof on the first woman whom he chances to meet.
+If yonder lay-figure had had the luck to meet him first, she would have
+smitten him as deeply as I."
+
+"Are you angry with me?" asked Donatello dolorously.
+
+"Not in the least," answered Miriam, frankly giving him her hand. "Pray
+look over some of these sketches till I have leisure to chat with you
+a little. I hardly think I am in spirits enough to begin your portrait
+to-day."
+
+Donatello was as gentle and docile as a pet spaniel; as playful, too, in
+his general disposition, or saddening with his mistress's variable mood
+like that or any other kindly animal which has the faculty of
+bestowing its sympathies more completely than men or women can ever do.
+Accordingly, as Miriam bade him, he tried to turn his attention to a
+great pile and confusion of pen and ink sketches and pencil drawings
+which lay tossed together on a table. As it chanced, however, they gave
+the poor youth little delight.
+
+The first that he took up was a very impressive sketch, in which the
+artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the
+nail through the temples of Sisera. It was dashed off with remarkable
+power, and showed a touch or two that were actually lifelike and
+deathlike, as if Miriam had been standing by when Jael gave the first
+stroke of her murderous hammer, or as if she herself were Jael, and felt
+irresistibly impelled to make her bloody confession in this guise.
+
+Her first conception of the stern Jewess had evidently been that of
+perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty
+beauty; but, dissatisfied either with her own work or the terrible story
+itself, Miriam had added a certain wayward quirk of her pencil, which at
+once converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess. It was evident that
+a Jael like this would be sure to search Sisera's pockets as soon as the
+breath was out of his body.
+
+In another sketch she had attempted the story of Judith, which we see
+represented by the old masters so often, and in such various styles.
+Here, too, beginning with a passionate and fiery conception of the
+subject in all earnestness, she had given the last touches in utter
+scorn, as it were, of the feelings which at first took such powerful
+possession of her hand. The head of Holofernes (which, by the bye, had a
+pair of twisted mustaches, like those of a certain potentate of the
+day) being fairly cut off, was screwing its eyes upward and twirling
+its features into a diabolical grin of triumphant malice, which it flung
+right in Judith's face. On her part, she had the startled aspect that
+might be conceived of a cook if a calf's head should sneer at her when
+about to be popped into the dinner-pot.
+
+Over and over again, there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a
+revengeful mischief towards man. It was, indeed, very singular to
+see how the artist's imagination seemed to run on these stories of
+bloodshed, in which woman's hand was crimsoned by the stain; and how,
+too,--in one form or another, grotesque or sternly sad,--she failed not
+to bring out the moral, that woman must strike through her own heart to
+reach a human life, whatever were the motive that impelled her.
+
+One of the sketches represented the daughter of Herodias receiving the
+head of John the Baptist in a charger. The general conception appeared
+to be taken from Bernardo Luini's picture, in the Uffizzi Gallery at
+Florence; but Miriam had imparted to the saint's face a look of gentle
+and heavenly reproach, with sad and blessed eyes fixed upward at the
+maiden; by the force of which miraculous glance, her whole womanhood was
+at once awakened to love and endless remorse.
+
+These sketches had a most disagreeable effect on Donatello's peculiar
+temperament. He gave a shudder; his face assumed a look of trouble,
+fear, and disgust; he snatched up one sketch after another, as if about
+to tear it in pieces. Finally, shoving away the pile of drawings, he
+shrank back from the table and clasped his hands over his eyes.
+
+"What is the matter, Donatello?" asked Miriam, looking up from a
+letter which she was now writing. "Ah! I did not mean you to see those
+drawings. They are ugly phantoms that stole out of my mind; not things
+that I created, but things that haunt me. See! here are some trifles
+that perhaps will please you better."
+
+She gave him a portfolio, the sketches in which indicated a happier mood
+of mind, and one, it is to be hoped, more truly characteristic of the
+artist. Supposing neither of these classes of subject to show anything
+of her own individuality, Miriam had evidently a great scope of fancy,
+and a singular faculty of putting what looked like heart into her
+productions. The latter sketches were domestic and common scenes, so
+finely and subtilely idealized that they seemed such as we may see
+at any moment, and eye, where; while still there was the indefinable
+something added, or taken away, which makes all the difference between
+sordid life and an earthly paradise. The feeling and sympathy in all of
+them were deep and true. There was the scene, that comes once in every
+life, of the lover winning the soft and pure avowal of bashful affection
+from the maiden whose slender form half leans towards his arm, half
+shrinks from it, we know not which. There was wedded affection in its
+successive stages, represented in a series of delicately conceived
+designs, touched with a holy fire, that burned from youth to age in
+those two hearts, and gave one identical beauty to the faces throughout
+all the changes of feature.
+
+There was a drawing of an infant's shoe, half worn out, with the airy
+print of the blessed foot within; a thing that would make a mother smile
+or weep out of the very depths of her heart; and yet an actual mother
+would not have been likely to appreciate the poetry of the little shoe,
+until Miriam revealed it to her. It was wonderful, the depth and force
+with which the above, and other kindred subjects, were depicted, and the
+profound significance which they often acquired. The artist, still in
+her fresh youth, could not probably have drawn any of these dear and
+rich experiences from her own life; unless, perchance, that first sketch
+of all, the avowal of maiden affection, were a remembered incident, and
+not a prophecy. But it is more delightful to believe that, from first to
+last, they were the productions of a beautiful imagination, dealing with
+the warm and pure suggestions of a woman's heart, and thus idealizing
+a truer and lovelier picture of the life that belongs to woman, than
+an actual acquaintance with some of its hard and dusty facts could have
+inspired. So considered, the sketches intimated such a force and variety
+of imaginative sympathies as would enable Miriam to fill her life richly
+with the bliss and suffering of womanhood, however barren it might
+individually be.
+
+There was one observable point, indeed, betokening that the artist
+relinquished, for her personal self, the happiness which she could so
+profoundly appreciate for others. In all those sketches of common life,
+and the affections that spiritualize it, a figure was portrayed apart,
+now it peeped between the branches of a shrubbery, amid which two lovers
+sat; now it was looking through a frosted window, from the outside,
+while a young wedded pair sat at their new fireside within; and once it
+leaned from a chariot, which six horses were whirling onward in pomp
+and pride, and gazed at a scene of humble enjoyment by a cottage door.
+Always it was the same figure, and always depicted with an expression of
+deep sadness; and in every instance, slightly as they were brought out,
+the face and form had the traits of Miriam's own.
+
+"Do you like these sketches better, Donatello?" asked Miriam. "Yes,"
+said Donatello rather doubtfully. "Not much, I fear," responded she,
+laughing. "And what should a boy like you--a Faun too,--know about the
+joys and sorrows, the intertwining light and shadow, of human life? I
+forgot that you were a Faun. You cannot suffer deeply; therefore you
+can but half enjoy. Here, now, is a subject which you can better
+appreciate."
+
+The sketch represented merely a rustic dance, but with such extravagance
+of fun as was delightful to behold; and here there was no drawback,
+except that strange sigh and sadness which always come when we are
+merriest.
+
+"I am going to paint the picture in oils," said the artist; "and I want
+you, Donatello, for the wildest dancer of them all. Will you sit for me,
+some day?--or, rather, dance for me?"
+
+"O, most gladly, signorina!" exclaimed Donatello. "See; it shall be like
+this."
+
+And forthwith he began to dance, and flit about the studio, like an
+incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one
+toe, as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky
+nature could come in contact with the earth. The effect in that shadowy
+chamber, whence the artist had so carefully excluded the sunshine, was
+as enlivening as if one bright ray had contrived to shimmer in and
+frolic around the walls, and finally rest just in the centre of the
+floor.
+
+"That was admirable!" said Miriam, with an approving smile. "If I can
+catch you on my canvas, it will be a glorious picture; only I am afraid
+you will dance out of it, by the very truth of the representation, just
+when I shall have given it the last touch. We will try it one of these
+days. And now, to reward you for that jolly exhibition, you shall see
+what has been shown to no one else."
+
+She went to her easel, on which was placed a picture with its back
+turned towards the spectator. Reversing the position, there appeared the
+portrait of a beautiful woman, such as one sees only two or three, if
+even so many times, in all a lifetime; so beautiful, that she seemed to
+get into your consciousness and memory, and could never afterwards be
+shut out, but haunted your dreams, for pleasure or for pain; holding
+your inner realm as a conquered territory, though without deigning to
+make herself at home there.
+
+She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought to be a Jewish
+aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither
+was it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look as deeply as your
+glance would go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not
+sounded, though it lay open to the day. She had black, abundant hair,
+with none of the vulgar glossiness of other women's sable locks; if she
+were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory
+such as crowns no Christian maiden's head. Gazing at this portrait, you
+saw what Rachel might have been, when Jacob deemed her worth the wooing
+seven years, and seven more; or perchance she might ripen to be what
+Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him
+for too much adoring it.
+
+Miriam watched Donatello's contemplation of the picture, and seeing his
+simple rapture, a smile of pleasure brightened on her face, mixed with a
+little scorn; at least, her lips curled, and her eyes gleamed, as if she
+disdained either his admiration or her own enjoyment of it.
+
+"Then you like the picture, Donatello?" she asked.
+
+"O, beyond what I can tell!" he answered. "So beautiful!--so beautiful!"
+
+"And do you recognize the likeness?"
+
+"Signorina," exclaimed Donatello, turning from the picture to the
+artist, in astonishment that she should ask the question, "the
+resemblance is as little to be mistaken as if you had bent over the
+smooth surface of a fountain, and possessed the witchcraft to call forth
+the image that you made there! It is yourself!"
+
+Donatello said the truth; and we forebore to speak descriptively of
+Miriam's beauty earlier in our narrative, because we foresaw this
+occasion to bring it perhaps more forcibly before the reader.
+
+We know not whether the portrait were a flattered likeness; probably
+not, regarding it merely as the delineation of a lovely face; although
+Miriam, like all self-painters, may have endowed herself with certain
+graces which Other eyes might not discern. Artists are fond of painting
+their own portraits; and, in Florence, there is a gallery of hundreds
+of them, including the most illustrious, in all of which there are
+autobiographical characteristics, so to speak,--traits, expressions,
+loftinesses, and amenities, which would have been invisible, had they
+not been painted from within. Yet their reality and truth are none
+the less. Miriam, in like manner, had doubtless conveyed some of the
+intimate results of her heart knowledge into her own portrait, and
+perhaps wished to try whether they would be perceptible to so simple and
+natural an observer as Donatello.
+
+"Does the expression please you?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," said Donatello hesitatingly; "if it would only smile so like the
+sunshine as you sometimes do. No, it is sadder than I thought at first.
+Cannot you make yourself smile a little, signorina?"
+
+"A forced smile is uglier than a frown," said Miriam, a bright, natural
+smile breaking out over her face even as she spoke.
+
+"O, catch it now!" cried Donatello, clapping his hands. "Let it shine
+upon the picture! There! it has vanished already! And you are sad again,
+very sad; and the picture gazes sadly forth at me, as if some evil had
+befallen it in the little time since I looked last."
+
+"How perplexed you seem, my friend!" answered Miriam. "I really half
+believe you are a Faun, there is such a mystery and terror for you in
+these dark moods, which are just as natural as daylight to us people of
+ordinary mould. I advise you, at all events, to look at other faces with
+those innocent and happy eyes, and never more to gaze at mine!"
+
+"You speak in vain," replied the young man, with a deeper emphasis than
+she had ever before heard in his voice; "shroud yourself in what gloom
+you will, I must needs follow you."
+
+"Well, well, well," said Miriam impatiently; "but leave me now; for to
+speak plainly, my good friend, you grow a little wearisome. I walk
+this afternoon in the Borghese grounds. Meet me there, if it suits your
+pleasure."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE
+
+
+After Donatello had left the studio, Miriam herself came forth, and
+taking her way through some of the intricacies of the city, entered what
+might be called either a widening of a street, or a small piazza. The
+neighborhood comprised a baker's oven, emitting the usual fragrance of
+sour bread; a shoe shop; a linen-draper's shop; a pipe and cigar shop; a
+lottery office; a station for French soldiers, with a sentinel pacing in
+front; and a fruit-stand, at which a Roman matron was selling the
+dried kernels of chestnuts, wretched little figs, and some bouquets of
+yesterday. A church, of course, was near at hand, the facade of which
+ascended into lofty pinnacles, whereon were perched two or three winged
+figures of stone, either angelic or allegorical, blowing stone trumpets
+in close vicinity to the upper windows of an old and shabby palace.
+This palace was distinguished by a feature not very common in the
+architecture of Roman edifices; that is to say, a mediaeval tower,
+square, massive, lofty, and battlemented and machicolated at the summit.
+
+At one of the angles of the battlements stood a shrine of the Virgin,
+such as we see everywhere at the street corners of Rome, but seldom or
+never, except in this solitary, instance, at a height above the ordinary
+level of men's views and aspirations. Connected with this old tower and
+its lofty shrine, there is a legend which we cannot here pause to tell;
+but for centuries a lamp has been burning before the Virgin's image, at
+noon, at midnight, and at all hours of the twenty-four, and must be kept
+burning forever, as long as the tower shall stand; or else the tower
+itself, the palace, and whatever estate belongs to it, shall pass from
+its hereditary possessor, in accordance with an ancient vow, and become
+the property of the Church.
+
+As Miriam approached, she looked upward, and saw,--not, indeed, the
+flame of the never-dying lamp, which was swallowed up in the broad
+sunlight that brightened the shrine, but a flock of white doves,
+skimming, fluttering, and wheeling about the topmost height of the
+tower, their silver wings flashing in the pure transparency of the
+air. Several of them sat on the ledge of the upper window, pushing one
+another off by their eager struggle for this favorite station, and all
+tapping their beaks and flapping their wings tumultuously against the
+panes; some had alighted in the street, far below, but flew hastily
+upward, at the sound of the window being thrust ajar, and opening in the
+middle, on rusty hinges, as Roman windows do.
+
+A fair young girl, dressed in white, showed herself at the aperture for
+a single instant, and threw forth as much as her two small hands could
+hold of some kind of food, for the flock of eleemosynary doves. It
+seemed greatly to the taste of the feathered people; for they tried to
+snatch beakfuls of it from her grasp, caught it in the air, and rushed
+downward after it upon the pavement.
+
+"What a pretty scene this is," thought Miriam, with a kindly smile, "and
+how like a dove she is herself, the fair, pure creature! The other doves
+know her for a sister, I am sure."
+
+Miriam passed beneath the deep portal of the palace, and turning to the
+left, began to mount flight after flight of a staircase, which, for the
+loftiness of its aspiration, was worthy to be Jacob's ladder, or, at all
+events, the staircase of the Tower of Babel. The city bustle, which
+is heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable
+paving-stones, the hard harsh cries reechoing in the high and narrow
+streets, grew faint and died away; as the turmoil of the world will
+always die, if we set our faces to climb heavenward. Higher, and higher
+still; and now, glancing through the successive windows that threw in
+their narrow light upon the stairs, her view stretched across the roofs
+of the city, unimpeded even by the stateliest palaces. Only the domes of
+churches ascend into this airy region, and hold up their golden crosses
+on a level with her eye; except that, out of the very heart of Rome,
+the column of Antoninus thrusts itself upward, with St. Paul upon its
+summit, the sole human form that seems to have kept her company.
+
+Finally, the staircase came to an end; save that, on one side of the
+little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access
+to the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine. On the other side was
+a door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement
+of her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting
+no response, she lifted the latch and entered.
+
+"What a hermitage you have found for yourself, dear Hilda!" she,
+exclaimed. "You breathe sweet air, above all the evil scents of Rome;
+and even so, in your maiden elevation, you dwell above our vanities and
+passions, our moral dust and mud, with the doves and the angels for your
+nearest neighbors. I should not wonder if the Catholics were to make a
+saint of you, like your namesake of old; especially as you have almost
+avowed yourself of their religion, by undertaking to keep the lamp
+alight before the Virgin's shrine."
+
+"No, no, Miriam!" said Hilda, who had come joyfully forward to greet
+her friend. "You must not call me a Catholic. A Christian girl--even
+a daughter of the Puritans--may surely pay honor to the idea of divine
+Womanhood, without giving up the faith of her forefathers. But how kind
+you are to climb into my dove-cote!"
+
+"It is no trifling proof of friendship, indeed," answered Miriam; "I
+should think there were three hundred stairs at least."
+
+"But it will do you good," continued Hilda. "A height of some fifty feet
+above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get
+from fifty miles of distance. The air so exhilarates my spirits, that
+sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my
+tower, in the faith that I should float upward."
+
+"O, pray don't try it!" said Miriam, laughing; "If it should turn out
+that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman
+pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never
+come down among us again."
+
+This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which
+it is possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her
+tower, as free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city
+beneath, as one of her companion doves to fly downward into the
+street;--all alone, perfectly independent, under her own sole
+guardianship, unless watched over by the Virgin, whose shrine she
+tended; doing what she liked without a suspicion or a shadow upon the
+snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs of artist life bestow such
+liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere restricted within so much
+narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication that, whenever we admit
+women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions, we must also remove
+the shackles of our present conventional rules, which would then become
+an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife. The system seems to
+work unexceptionably in Rome; and in many other cases, as in Hilda's,
+purity of heart and life are allowed to assert themselves, and to be
+their own proof and security, to a degree unknown in the society of
+other cities.
+
+Hilda, in her native land, had early shown what was pronounced by
+connoisseurs a decided genius for the pictorial art. Even in her
+schooldays--still not so very distant--she had produced sketches that
+were seized upon by men of taste, and hoarded as among the choicest
+treasures of their portfolios; scenes delicately imagined, lacking,
+perhaps, the reality which comes only from a close acquaintance with
+life, but so softly touched with feeling and fancy that you seemed to
+be looking at humanity with angels' eyes. With years and experience
+she might be expected to attain a darker and more forcible touch, which
+would impart to her designs the relief they needed. Had Hilda remained
+in her own country, it is not improbable that she might have produced
+original works worthy to hang in that gallery of native art which,
+we hope, is destined to extend its rich length through many future
+centuries. An orphan, however, without near relatives, and possessed of
+a little property, she had found it within her possibilities to come
+to Italy; that central clime, whither the eyes and the heart of every
+artist turn, as if pictures could not be made to glow in any other
+atmosphere, as if statues could not assume grace and expression, save in
+that land of whitest marble.
+
+Hilda's gentle courage had brought her safely over land and sea; her
+mild, unflagging perseverance had made a place for her in the famous
+city, even like a flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little
+earth to grow in, on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten.
+Here she dwelt, in her tower, possessing a friend or two in Rome, but
+no home companion except the flock of doves, whose cote was in a ruinous
+chamber contiguous to her own. They soon became as familiar with the
+fair-haired Saxon girl as if she were a born sister of their brood; and
+her customary white robe bore such an analogy to their snowy plumage
+that the confraternity of artists called Hilda the Dove, and recognized
+her aerial apartment as the Dovecote. And while the other doves flew far
+and wide in quest of what was good for them, Hilda likewise spread
+her wings, and sought such ethereal and imaginative sustenance as God
+ordains for creatures of her kind.
+
+We know not whether the result of her Italian studies, so far as it
+could yet be seen, will be accepted as a good or desirable one. Certain
+it is, that since her arrival in the pictorial land, Hilda seemed to
+have entirely lost the impulse of original design, which brought her
+thither. No doubt the girl's early dreams had been of sending forms and
+hues of beauty into the visible world out of her own mind; of compelling
+scenes of poetry and history to live before men's eyes, through
+conceptions and by methods individual to herself. But more and more, as
+she grew familiar with the miracles of art that enrich so many galleries
+in Rome, Hilda had ceased to consider herself as an original artist. No,
+wonder that this change should have befallen her. She was endowed with
+a deep and sensitive faculty of appreciation; she had the gift of
+discerning and worshipping excellence in a most unusual measure. No
+other person, it is probable, recognized so adequately, and enjoyed with
+such deep delight, the pictorial wonders that were here displayed. She
+saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed
+upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman's sympathy; not by any
+intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding
+light of sympathy, she went straight to the central point, in which the
+master had conceived his work. Thus she viewed it, as it were, with his
+own eyes, and hence her comprehension of any picture that interested her
+was perfect.
+
+This power and depth of appreciation depended partly upon Hilda's
+physical organization, which was at once healthful and exquisitely
+delicate; and, connected with this advantage, she had a command of
+hand, a nicety and force of touch, which is an endowment separate from
+pictorial genius, though indispensable to its exercise.
+
+It has probably happened in many other instances, as it did in Hilda's
+case, that she ceased to aim at original achievement in consequence of
+the very gifts which so exquisitely fitted her to profit by familiarity
+with the works of the mighty old masters. Reverencing these wonderful
+men so deeply, she was too grateful for all they bestowed upon her,
+too loyal, too humble, in their awful presence, to think of enrolling
+herself in their society. Beholding the miracles of beauty which they
+had achieved, the world seemed already rich enough in original designs,
+and nothing more was so desirable as to diffuse those self-same beauties
+more widely among mankind. All the youthful hopes and ambitions, the
+fanciful ideas which she had brought from home, of great pictures to be
+conceived in her feminine mind, were flung aside, and, so far as those
+most intimate with her could discern, relinquished without a sigh. All
+that she would henceforth attempt and that most reverently, not to say
+religiously was to catch and reflect some of the glory which had been
+shed upon canvas from the immortal pencils of old.
+
+So Hilda became a copyist: in the Pinacotheca of the Vatican, in the
+galleries of the Pam-fili-Doria palace, the Borghese, the Corsini, the
+Sciarra, her easel was set up before many a famous picture by Guido,
+Domenichino, Raphael, and the devout painters of earlier schools than
+these. Other artists and visitors from foreign lands beheld the slender,
+girlish figure in front of some world-known work, absorbed, unconscious
+of everything around her, seeming to live only in what she sought to do.
+They smiled, no doubt, at the audacity which led her to dream of
+copying those mighty achievements. But, if they paused to look over her
+shoulder, and had sensibility enough to understand what was before their
+eyes, they soon felt inclined to believe that the spirits of the old
+masters were hovering over Hilda, and guiding her delicate white hand.
+In truth, from whatever realm of bliss and many colored beauty those
+spirits might descend, it would have been no unworthy errand to help so
+gentle and pure a worshipper of their genius in giving the last divine
+touch to her repetitions of their works.
+
+Her copies were indeed marvellous. Accuracy was not the phrase for them;
+a Chinese copy is accurate. Hilda's had that evanescent and ethereal
+life--that flitting fragrance, as it were, of the originals--which it
+is as difficult to catch and retain as it would be for a sculptor to
+get the very movement and varying color of a living man into his marble
+bust. Only by watching the efforts of the most skilful copyists--men who
+spend a lifetime, as some of them do, in multiplying copies of a
+single picture--and observing how invariably they leave out just the
+indefinable charm that involves the last, inestimable value, can we
+understand the difficulties of the task which they undertake.
+
+It was not Hilda's general practice to attempt reproducing the whole of
+a great picture, but to select some high, noble, and delicate portion
+of it, in which the spirit and essence of the picture culminated: the
+Virgin's celestial sorrow, for example, or a hovering angel, imbued
+with immortal light, or a saint with the glow of heaven in his dying
+face,--and these would be rendered with her whole soul. If a picture had
+darkened into an indistinct shadow through time and neglect, or had been
+injured by cleaning, or retouched by some profane hand, she seemed to
+possess the faculty of seeing it in its pristine glory. The copy would
+come from her hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which
+the old master had left upon the original in bestowing his final and
+most ethereal touch. In some instances even (at least, so those believed
+who best appreciated Hilda's power and sensibility) she had been enabled
+to execute what the great master had conceived in his imagination, but
+had not so perfectly succeeded in putting upon canvas; a result surely
+not impossible when such depth of sympathy as she possessed was assisted
+by the delicate skill and accuracy of her slender hand. In such cases
+the girl was but a finer instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece
+of mechanism, by the help of which the spirit of some great departed
+painter now first achieved his ideal, centuries after his own earthly
+hand, that other tool, had turned to dust.
+
+Not to describe her as too much a wonder, however, Hilda, or the Dove,
+as her well-wishers half laughingly delighted to call her, had been
+pronounced by good judges incomparably the best copyist in Rome. After
+minute examination of her works, the most skilful artists declared that
+she had been led to her results by following precisely the same process
+step by step through which the original painter had trodden to the
+development of his idea. Other copyists--if such they are worthy to be
+called--attempt only a superficial imitation. Copies of the old masters
+in this sense are produced by thousands; there are artists, as we have
+said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single
+work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they
+convert themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines. Their
+performances, it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless
+eye; but working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to
+reproduce the surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable
+nothing, that inestimable something, that constitutes the life and
+soul through which the picture gets its immortality. Hilda was no
+such machine as this; she wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a
+miracle.
+
+It strikes us that there is something far higher and nobler in all this,
+in her thus sacrificing herself to the devout recognition of the highest
+excellence in art, than there would have been in cultivating her not
+inconsiderable share of talent for the production of works from her own
+ideas. She might have set up for herself, and won no ignoble name; she
+might have helped to fill the already crowded and cumbered world with
+pictures, not destitute of merit, but falling short, if by ever so
+little, of the best that has been done; she might thus have gratified
+some tastes that were incapable of appreciating Raphael. But this could
+be done only by lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of
+the spectator. She chose the better and loftier and more unselfish
+part, laying her individual hopes, her fame, her prospects of enduring
+remembrance, at the feet of those great departed ones whom she so loved
+and venerated; and therefore the world was the richer for this feeble
+girl.
+
+Since the beauty and glory of a great picture are confined within
+itself, she won out that glory by patient faith and self-devotion,
+and multiplied it for mankind. From the dark, chill corner of a
+gallery,--from some curtained chapel in a church, where the light came
+seldom and aslant,--from the prince's carefully guarded cabinet, where
+not one eye in thousands was permitted to behold it, she brought the
+wondrous picture into daylight, and gave all its magic splendor for the
+enjoyment of the world. Hilda's faculty of genuine admiration is one of
+the rarest to be found in human nature; and let us try to recompense her
+in kind by admiring her generous self-surrender, and her brave, humble
+magnanimity in choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians,
+instead of a minor enchantress within a circle of her own.
+
+The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin's love! Would it
+have been worth Hilda's while to relinquish this office for the sake of
+giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty
+fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart in picture of so many
+feminine achievements in literature!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+BEATRICE
+
+
+Miriam was glad to find the Dove in her turret-home; for being endowed
+with an infinite activity, and taking exquisite delight in the sweet
+labor of which her life was full, it was Hilda's practice to flee abroad
+betimes, and haunt the galleries till dusk. Happy were those (but they
+were very few) whom she ever chose to be the companions of her day; they
+saw the art treasures of Rome, under her guidance, as they had never
+seen them before. Not that Hilda could dissertate, or talk learnedly
+about pictures; she would probably have been puzzled by the technical
+terms of her own art. Not that she had much to say about what she most
+profoundly admired; but even her silent sympathy was so powerful that
+it drew your own along with it, endowing you with a second-sight that
+enabled you to see excellences with almost the depth and delicacy of her
+own perceptions.
+
+All the Anglo-Saxon denizens of Rome, by this time, knew Hilda by sight.
+Unconsciously, the poor child had become one of the spectacles of the
+Eternal City, and was often pointed out to strangers, sitting at her
+easel among the wild-bearded young men, the white-haired old ones, and
+the shabbily dressed, painfully plain women, who make up the throng of
+copyists. The old custodes knew her well, and watched over her as their
+own child. Sometimes a young artist, instead of going on with a copy
+of the picture before which he had placed his easel, would enrich
+his canvas with an original portrait of Hilda at her work. A lovelier
+subject could not have been selected, nor one which required nicer skill
+and insight in doing it anything like justice. She was pretty at all
+times, in our native New England style, with her light-brown ringlets,
+her delicately tinged, but healthful cheek, her sensitive, intelligent,
+yet most feminine and kindly face. But, every few moments, this pretty
+and girlish face grew beautiful and striking, as some inward thought and
+feeling brightened, rose to the surface, and then, as it were, passed
+out of sight again; so that, taking into view this constantly recurring
+change, it really seemed as if Hilda were only visible by the sunshine
+of her soul.
+
+In other respects, she was a good subject for a portrait, being
+distinguished by a gentle picturesqueness, which was perhaps
+unconsciously bestowed by some minute peculiarity of dress, such as
+artists seldom fail to assume. The effect was to make her appear like an
+inhabitant of pictureland, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled,
+nor even approached too closely. In her feminine self, Hilda was
+natural, and of pleasant deportment, endowed with a mild cheerfulness of
+temper, not overflowing with animal spirits, but never long despondent.
+There was a certain simplicity that made every one her friend, but it
+was combined with a subtile attribute of reserve, that insensibly kept
+those at a distance who were not suited to her sphere.
+
+Miriam was the dearest friend whom she had ever known. Being a year or
+two the elder, of longer acquaintance with Italy, and better fitted to
+deal with its crafty and selfish inhabitants, she had helped Hilda to
+arrange her way of life, and had encouraged her through those first
+weeks, when Rome is so dreary to every newcomer.
+
+"But how lucky that you are at home today," said Miriam, continuing the
+conversation which was begun, many pages back. "I hardly hoped to find
+you, though I had a favor to ask,--a commission to put into your charge.
+But what picture is this?"
+
+"See!" said Hilda, taking her friend's hand, and leading her in front of
+the easel. "I wanted your opinion of it."
+
+"If you have really succeeded," observed Miriam, recognizing the picture
+at the first glance, "it will be the greatest miracle you have yet
+achieved."
+
+The picture represented simply a female head; a very youthful, girlish,
+perfectly beautiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which
+strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich, though hidden luxuriance
+of auburn hair. The eyes were large and brown, and met those of the
+spectator, but evidently with a strange, ineffectual effort to escape.
+There was a little redness about the eyes, very slightly indicated, so
+that you would question whether or no the girl had been weeping. The
+whole face was quiet; there was no distortion or disturbance of any
+single feature; nor was it easy to see why the expression was not
+cheerful, or why a single touch of the artist's pencil should not
+brighten it into joyousness. But, in fact, it was the very saddest
+picture ever painted or conceived; it involved an unfathomable depth of
+sorrow, the sense of which came to the observer by a sort of intuition.
+It was a sorrow that removed this beautiful girl out of the sphere
+of humanity, and set her in a far-off region, the remoteness of
+which--while yet her face is so close before us--makes us shiver as at a
+spectre.
+
+"Yes, Hilda," said her friend, after closely examining the picture,
+"you have done nothing else so wonderful as this. But by what unheard-of
+solicitations or secret interest have you obtained leave to copy Guido's
+Beatrice Cenci? It is an unexampled favor; and the impossibility
+of getting a genuine copy has filled the Roman picture shops with
+Beatrices, gay, grievous, or coquettish, but never a true one among
+them."
+
+"There has been one exquisite copy, I have heard," said Hilda, "by
+an artist capable of appreciating the spirit of the picture. It was
+Thompson, who brought it away piecemeal, being forbidden (like the
+rest of us) to set up his easel before it. As for me, I knew the Prince
+Barberini would be deaf to all entreaties; so I had no resource but
+to sit down before the picture, day after day, and let it sink into my
+heart. I do believe it is now photographed there. It is a sad face to
+keep so close to one's heart; only what is so very beautiful can never
+be quite a pain. Well; after studying it in this way, I know not how
+many times, I came home, and have done my best to transfer the image to
+canvas."
+
+"Here it is, then," said Miriam, contemplating Hilda's work with great
+interest and delight, mixed with the painful sympathy that the picture
+excited. "Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayon sketches, cameos,
+engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice, and representing the
+poor girl with blubbered eyes, a leer of coquetry, a merry look as if
+she were dancing, a piteous look as if she were beaten, and twenty other
+modes of fantastic mistake. But here is Guido's very Beatrice; she that
+slept in the dungeon, and awoke, betimes, to ascend the scaffold, And
+now that you have done it, Hilda, can you interpret what the feeling
+is, that gives this picture such a mysterious force? For my part, though
+deeply sensible of its influence, I cannot seize it."
+
+"Nor can I, in words," replied her friend. "But while I was painting
+her, I felt all the time as if she were trying to escape from my gaze.
+She knows that her sorrow is so strange and so immense, that she ought
+to be solitary forever, both for the world's sake and her own; and this
+is the reason we feel such a distance between Beatrice and ourselves,
+even when our eyes meet hers. It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet
+her glance, and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her;
+neither does she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of her
+case better than we do. She is a fallen angel,--fallen, and yet sinless;
+and it is only this depth of sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that
+keeps her down upon earth, and brings her within our view even while it
+sets her beyond our reach."
+
+"You deem her sinless?" asked Miriam; "that is not so plain to me. If
+I can pretend to see at all into that dim region, whence she gazes so
+strangely and sadly at us, Beatrice's own conscience does not acquit her
+of something evil, and never to be forgiven!"
+
+"Sorrow so black as hers oppresses her very nearly as sin would," said
+Hilda.
+
+"Then," inquired Miriam, "do you think that there was no sin in the deed
+for which she suffered?"
+
+"Ah!" replied Hilda, shuddering, "I really had quite forgotten
+Beatrice's history, and was thinking of her only as the picture seems
+to reveal her character. Yes, yes; it was terrible guilt, an inexpiable
+crime, and she feels it to be so. Therefore it is that the forlorn
+creature so longs to elude our eyes, and forever vanish away into
+nothingness! Her doom is just!"
+
+"O Hilda, your innocence is like a sharp steel sword!" exclaimed her
+friend. "Your judgments are often terribly severe, though you seem all
+made up of gentleness and mercy. Beatrice's sin may not have been so
+great: perhaps it was no sin at all, but the best virtue possible in the
+circumstances. If she viewed it as a sin, it may have been because her
+nature was too feeble for the fate imposed upon her. Ah!" continued
+Miriam passionately, "if I could only get within her consciousness!--if
+I could but clasp Beatrice Cenci's ghost, and draw it into myself! I
+would give my life to know whether she thought herself innocent, or the
+one great criminal since time began."
+
+As Miriam gave utterance to these words, Hilda looked from the picture
+into her face, and was startled to observe that her friend's expression
+had become almost exactly that of the portrait; as if her passionate
+wish and struggle to penetrate poor Beatrice's mystery had been
+successful.
+
+"O, for Heaven's sake, Miriam, do not look so!" she cried. "What an
+actress you are! And I never guessed it before. Ah! now you are yourself
+again!" she added, kissing her. "Leave Beatrice to me in future."
+
+"Cover up your magical picture, then," replied her friend, "else I
+never can look away from it. It is strange, dear Hilda, how an innocent,
+delicate, white soul like yours has been able to seize the subtle
+mystery of this portrait; as you surely must, in order to reproduce it
+so perfectly. Well; we will not talk of it any more. Do you know, I
+have come to you this morning on a small matter of business. Will you
+undertake it for me?"
+
+"O, certainly," said Hilda, laughing; "if you choose to trust me with
+business."
+
+"Nay, it is not a matter of any difficulty," answered Miriam; "merely to
+take charge of this packet, and keep it for me awhile."
+
+"But why not keep it yourself?" asked Hilda.
+
+"Partly because it will be safer in your charge," said her friend. "I
+am a careless sort of person in ordinary things; while you, for all you
+dwell so high above the world, have certain little housewifely ways of
+accuracy and order. The packet is of some slight importance; and yet, it
+may be, I shall not ask you for it again. In a week or two, you know,
+I am leaving Rome. You, setting at defiance the malarial fever, mean to
+stay here and haunt your beloved galleries through the summer. Now, four
+months hence, unless you hear more from me, I would have you deliver the
+packet according to its address."
+
+Hilda read the direction; it was to Signore Luca Barboni, at the Plazzo
+Cenci, third piano.
+
+"I will deliver it with my own hand," said she, "precisely four months
+from to-day, unless you bid me to the contrary. Perhaps I shall meet the
+ghost of Beatrice in that grim old palace of her forefathers."
+
+"In that case," rejoined Miriam, "do not fail to speak to her, and
+try to win her confidence. Poor thing! she would be all the better for
+pouring her heart out freely, and would be glad to do it, if she were
+sure of sympathy. It irks my brain and heart to think of her, all shut
+up within herself." She withdrew the cloth that Hilda had drawn over the
+picture, and took another long look at it. "Poor sister Beatrice! for
+she was still a woman, Hilda, still a sister, be her sin or sorrow what
+they might. How well you have done it, Hilda! I knot not whether Guido
+will thank you, or be jealous of your rivalship."
+
+"Jealous, indeed!" exclaimed Hilda. "If Guido had not wrought through
+me, my pains would have been thrown away."
+
+"After all," resumed Miriam, "if a woman had painted the original
+picture, there might have been something in it which we miss now. I
+have a great mind to undertake a copy myself; and try to give it what
+it lacks. Well; goodby. But, stay! I am going for a little airing to
+the grounds of the Villa Borghese this afternoon. You will think it very
+foolish, but I always feel the safer in your company, Hilda, slender
+little maiden as you are. Will you come?"
+
+"Ah, not to-day, dearest Miriam," she replied; "I have set my heart on
+giving another touch or two to this picture, and shall not stir abroad
+till nearly sunset."
+
+"Farewell, then," said her visitor. "I leave you in your dove-cote. What
+a sweet, strange life you lead here; conversing with the souls of the
+old masters, feeding and fondling your sister doves, and trimming the
+Virgin's lamp! Hilda, do you ever pray to the Virgin while you tend her
+shrine?"
+
+"Sometimes I have been moved to do so," replied the Dove, blushing,
+and lowering her eyes; "she was a woman once. Do you think it would be
+wrong?"
+
+"Nay, that is for you to judge," said Miriam; "but when you pray next,
+dear friend, remember me!"
+
+She went down the long descent of the lower staircase, and just as she
+reached the street the flock of doves again took their hurried flight
+from the pavement to the topmost window. She threw her eyes upward
+and beheld them hovering about Hilda's head; for, after her friend's
+departure, the girl had been more impressed than before by something
+very sad and troubled in her manner. She was, therefore, leaning forth
+from her airy abode, and flinging down a kind, maidenly kiss, and a
+gesture of farewell, in the hope that these might alight upon Miriam's
+heart, and comfort its unknown sorrow a little. Kenyon the sculptor, who
+chanced to be passing the head of the street, took note of that ethereal
+kiss, and wished that he could have caught it in the air and got Hilda's
+leave to keep it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+THE SUBURBAN VILLA
+
+
+Donatello, while it was still a doubtful question betwixt afternoon and
+morning, set forth to keep the appointment which Miriam had carelessly
+tendered him in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The entrance to these
+grounds (as all my readers know, for everybody nowadays has been in
+Rome) is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. Passing beneath that not
+very impressive specimen of Michael Angelo's architecture, a minute's
+walk will transport the visitor from the small, uneasy, lava stones
+of the Roman pavement into broad, gravelled carriage-drives, whence
+a little farther stroll brings him to the soft turf of a beautiful
+seclusion. A seclusion, but seldom a solitude; for priest, noble, and
+populace, stranger and native, all who breathe Roman air, find free
+admission, and come hither to taste the languid enjoyment of the
+day-dream that they call life.
+
+But Donatello's enjoyment was of a livelier kind. He soon began to draw
+long and delightful breaths among those shadowy walks. Judging by the
+pleasure which the sylvan character of the scene excited in him, it
+might be no merely fanciful theory to set him down as the kinsman, not
+far remote, of that wild, sweet, playful, rustic creature, to whose
+marble image he bore so striking a resemblance. How mirthful a discovery
+would it be (and yet with a touch of pathos in it), if the breeze which
+sported fondly with his clustering locks were to waft them suddenly
+aside, and show a pair of leaf-shaped, furry ears! What an honest strain
+of wildness would it indicate! and into what regions of rich mystery
+would it extend Donatello's sympathies, to be thus linked (and by no
+monstrous chain) with what we call the inferior trioes of being, whose
+simplicity, mingled with his human intelligence, might partly restore
+what man has lost of the divine!
+
+The scenery amid which the youth now strayed was such as arrays itself
+in the imagination when we read the beautiful old myths, and fancy a
+brighter sky, a softer turf, a more picturesque arrangement of venerable
+trees, than we find in the rude and untrained landscapes of the Western
+world. The ilex-trees, so ancient and time-honored were they, seemed to
+have lived for ages undisturbed, and to feel no dread of profanation by
+the axe any more than overthrow by the thunder-stroke. It had already
+passed out of their dreamy old memories that only a few years ago they
+were grievously imperilled by the Gaul's last assault upon the walls of
+Rome. As if confident in the long peace of their lifetime, they assumed
+attitudes of indolent repose. They leaned over the green turf in
+ponderous grace, throwing abroad their great branches without danger
+of interfering with other trees, though other majestic trees grew near
+enough for dignified society, but too distant for constraint. Never
+was there a more venerable quietude than that which slept among their
+sheltering boughs; never a sweeter sunshine than that now gladdening
+the gentle gloom which these leafy patriarchs strove to diffuse over the
+swelling and subsiding lawns.
+
+In other portions of the grounds the stone-pines lifted their dense
+clump of branches upon a slender length of stem, so high that they
+looked like green islands in the air, flinging down a shadow upon the
+turf so far off that you hardly knew which tree had made it. Again,
+there were avenues of cypress, resembling dark flames of huge funeral
+candles, which spread dusk and twilight round about them instead of
+cheerful radiance. The more open spots were all abloom, even so early in
+the season, with anemones of wondrous size, both white and rose-colored,
+and violets that betrayed themselves by their rich fragrance, even if
+their blue eyes failed to meet your own. Daisies, too, were abundant,
+but larger than the modest little English flower, and therefore of small
+account.
+
+These wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest
+of English park scenery, more touching, more impressive, through the
+neglect that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since
+man seldom interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way
+and makes herself at home. There is enough of human care, it is true,
+bestowed, long ago and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing
+into deformity; and the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene
+that seems to have been projected out of the poet's mind. If the ancient
+Faun were other than a mere creation of old poetry, and could have
+reappeared anywhere, it must have been in such a scene as this.
+
+In the openings of the wood there are fountains plashing into marble
+basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble
+like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to
+make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there
+with careless artifice, stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions.
+Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half
+hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen
+and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite
+porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either
+veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful
+ruin on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events,
+grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers
+root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of
+temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the
+thousandth summer since their winged seeds alighted there.
+
+What a strange idea--what a needless labor--to construct artificial
+ruins in Rome, the native soil of ruin! But even these sportive
+imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples
+and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions,
+have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a
+scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to
+be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences in the
+neighborhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and
+ages, during which growth, decay, and man's intelligence wrought kindly
+together, to render it so gently wild as we behold it now.
+
+The final charm is bestowed by the malaria. There is a piercing,
+thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown
+away, or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early
+spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home scenery of any human
+being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades
+in the golden sunset, fever walks arm in arm with you, and death awaits
+you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its
+loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond
+the scope of man's actual possessions. But Donatello felt nothing of
+this dream-like melancholy that haunts the spot. As he passed among the
+sunny shadows, his spirit seemed to acquire new elasticity. The flicker
+of the sunshine, the sparkle of the fountain's gush, the dance of the
+leaf upon the bough, the woodland fragrance, the green freshness,
+the old sylvan peace and freedom, were all intermingled in those long
+breaths which he drew.
+
+The ancient dust, the mouldiness of Rome, the dead atmosphere in which
+he had wasted so many months, the hard pavements, the smell of ruin and
+decaying generations, the chill palaces, the convent bells, the heavy
+incense of altars, the life that he had led in those dark, narrow
+streets, among priests, soldiers, nobles, artists, and women,--all the
+sense of these things rose from the young man's consciousness like a
+cloud which had darkened over him without his knowing how densely.
+
+He drank in the natural influences of the scene, and was intoxicated as
+by an exhilarating wine. He ran races with himself along the gleam and
+shadow of the wood-paths. He leapt up to catch the overhanging bough of
+an ilex, and swinging himself by it alighted far onward, as if he had
+flown thither through the air. In a sudden rapture he embraced the
+trunk of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature worthy of
+affection and capable of a tender response; he clasped it closely in his
+arms, as a Faun might have clasped the warm feminine grace of the nymph,
+whom antiquity supposed to dwell within that rough, encircling rind.
+Then, in order to bring himself closer to the genial earth, with which
+his kindred instincts linked him so strongly, he threw himself at full
+length on the turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and
+daisies, which kissed him back again, though shyly, in their maiden
+fashion.
+
+While he lay there, it was pleasant to see how the green and blue
+lizards, who had beta basking on some rock or on a fallen pillar that
+absorbed the warmth of the sun, scrupled not to scramble over him with
+their small feet; and how the birds alighted on the nearest twigs and
+sang their little roundelays unbroken by any chirrup of alarm; they
+recognized him, it may be, as something akin to themselves, or else they
+fancied that he was rooted and grew there; for these wild pets of nature
+dreaded him no more in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and
+grass and flowers had long since covered his dead body, converting it
+back to the sympathies from which human existence had estranged it.
+
+All of us, after a long abode in cities, have felt the blood gush more
+joyously through our veins with the first breath of rural air; few could
+feel it so much as Donatello, a creature of simple elements, bred in
+the sweet sylvan life of Tuscany, and for months back dwelling amid the
+mouldy gloom and dim splendor of old Rome. Nature has been shut out for
+numberless centuries from those stony-hearted streets, to which he had
+latterly grown accustomed; there is no trace of her, except for what
+blades of grass spring out of the pavements of the less trodden piazzas,
+or what weeds cluster and tuft themselves on the cornices of ruins.
+Therefore his joy was like that of a child that had gone astray from
+home, and finds him suddenly in his mother's arms again.
+
+At last, deeming it full time for Miriam to keep her tryst, he climbed
+to the tiptop of the tallest tree, and thence looked about him, swaying
+to and fro in the gentle breeze, which was like the respiration of that
+great leafy, living thing. Donatello saw beneath him the whole circuit
+of the enchanted ground; the statues and columns pointing upward from
+among the shrubbery, the fountains flashing in the sunlight, the paths
+winding hither and thither, and continually finding out some nook of new
+and ancient pleasantness. He saw the villa, too, with its marble front
+incrusted all over with basreliefs, and statues in its many niches. It
+was as beautiful as a fairy palace, and seemed an abode in which the
+lord and lady of this fair domain might fitly dwell, and come forth each
+morning to enjoy as sweet a life as their happiest dreams of the past
+night could have depicted. All this he saw, but his first glance had
+taken in too wide a sweep, and it was not till his eyes fell almost
+directly beneath him, that Donatello beheld Miriam just turning into the
+path that led across the roots of his very tree.
+
+He descended among the foliage, waiting for her to come close to the
+trunk, and then suddenly dropped from an impending bough, and alighted
+at her side. It was as if the swaying of the branches had let a ray
+of sunlight through. The same ray likewise glimmered among the gloomy
+meditations that encompassed Miriam, and lit up the pale, dark beauty of
+her face, while it responded pleasantly to Donatello's glance.
+
+"I hardly know," said she, smiling, "whether you have sprouted out of
+the earth, or fallen from the clouds. In either case you are welcome."
+
+And they walked onward together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE FAUN AND NYMPH
+
+
+Miriam's sadder mood, it might be, had at first an effect on Donatello's
+spirits. It checked the joyous ebullition into which they would
+otherwise have effervesced when he found himself in her society, not, as
+heretofore, in the old gloom of Rome, but under that bright soft sky and
+in those Arcadian woods. He was silent for a while; it being, indeed,
+seldom Donatello's impulse to express himself copiously in words. His
+usual modes of demonstration were by the natural language of gesture,
+the instinctive movement of his agile frame, and the unconscious play
+of his features, which, within a limited range of thought and emotion,
+would speak volumes in a moment.
+
+By and by, his own mood seemed to brighten Miriam's, and was reflected
+back upon himself. He began inevitably, as it were, to dance along
+the wood-path; flinging himself into attitudes of strange comic grace.
+Often, too, he ran a little way in advance of his companion, and then
+stood to watch her as she approached along the shadowy and sun-fleckered
+path. With every step she took, he expressed his joy at her nearer
+and nearer presence by what might be thought an extravagance of
+gesticulation, but which doubtless was the language of the natural man,
+though laid aside and forgotten by other men, now that words have been
+feebly substituted in the place of signs and symbols. He gave Miriam the
+idea of a being not precisely man, nor yet a child, but, in a high and
+beautiful sense, an animal, a creature in a state of development less
+than what mankind has attained, yet the more perfect within itself
+for that very deficiency. This idea filled her mobile imagination with
+agreeable fantasies, which, after smiling at them herself, she tried to
+convey to the young man.
+
+"What are you, my friend?" she exclaimed, always keeping in mind his
+singular resemblance to the Faun of the Capitol. "If you are, in good
+truth, that wild and pleasant creature whose face you wear, pray make me
+known to your kindred. They will be found hereabouts, if anywhere. Knock
+at the rough rind of this ilex-tree, and summon forth the Dryad! Ask the
+water-nymph to rise dripping from yonder fountain, and exchange a moist
+pressure of the hand with me! Do not fear that I shall shrink; even if
+one of your rough cousins, a hairy Satyr, should come capering on his
+goat-legs out of the haunts of far antiquity, and propose to dance with
+me among these lawns! And will not Bacchus,--with whom you consorted so
+familiarly of old, and who loved you so well,--will he not meet us here,
+and squeeze rich grapes into his cup for you and me?"
+
+Donatello smiled; he laughed heartily, indeed, in sympathy with the
+mirth that gleamed out of Miriam's deep, dark eyes. But he did not seem
+quite to understand her mirthful talk, nor to be disposed to explain
+what kind of creature he was, or to inquire with what divine or poetic
+kindred his companion feigned to link him. He appeared only to know that
+Miriam was beautiful, and that she smiled graciously upon him; that
+the present moment was very sweet, and himself most happy, with the
+sunshine, the sylvan scenery, and woman's kindly charm, which it
+enclosed within its small circumference. It was delightful to see the
+trust which he reposed in Miriam, and his pure joy in her propinquity;
+he asked nothing, sought nothing, save to be near the beloved object,
+and brimmed over with ecstasy at that simple boon. A creature of the
+happy tribes below us sometimes shows the capacity of this enjoyment; a
+man, seldom or never.
+
+"Donatello," said Miriam, looking at him thoughtfully, but amused, yet
+not without a shade of sorrow, "you seem very happy; what makes you so?"
+
+"Because I love you!" answered Donatello.
+
+He made this momentous confession as if it were the most natural
+thing in the world; and on her part,--such was the contagion of his
+simplicity,--Miriam heard it without anger or disturbance, though with
+no responding emotion. It was as if they had strayed across the limits
+of Arcadia; and come under a civil polity where young men might avow
+their passion with as little restraint as a bird pipes its note to a
+similar purpose.
+
+"Why should you love me, foolish boy?" said she. "We have no points of
+sympathy at all. There are not two creatures more unlike, in this wide
+world, than you and I!"
+
+"You are yourself, and I am Donatello," replied he. "Therefore I love
+you! There needs no other reason."
+
+Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason. It might
+have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more
+readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own,
+than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to
+be. Perhaps, On the other hand, his character needed the dark element,
+which it found in her. The force and energy of will, that sometimes
+flashed through her eyes, may have taken him captive; or, not
+improbably, the varying lights and shadows of her temper, now so
+mirthful, and anon so sad with mysterious gloom, had bewitched the
+youth. Analyze the matter as we may, the reason assigned by Donatello
+himself was as satisfactory as we are likely to attain.
+
+Miriam could not think seriously of the avowal that had passed. He held
+out his love so freely, in his open palm, that she felt it could be
+nothing but a toy, which she might play with for an instant, and give
+back again. And yet Donatello's heart was so fresh a fountain, that,
+had Miriam been more world-worn than she was, she might have found
+it exquisite to slake her thirst with the feelings that welled up and
+brimmed over from it. She was far, very far, from the dusty mediaeval
+epoch, when some women have a taste for such refreshment. Even for
+her, however, there was an inexpressible charm in the simplicity that
+prompted Donatello's words and deeds; though, unless she caught them
+in precisely the true light, they seemed but folly, the offspring of
+a maimed or imperfectly developed intellect. Alternately, she almost
+admired, or wholly scorned him, and knew not which estimate resulted
+from the deeper appreciation. But it could not, she decided for herself,
+be other than an innocent pastime, if they two--sure to be separated by
+their different paths in life, to-morrow--were to gather up some of the
+little pleasures that chanced to grow about their feet, like the violets
+and wood-anemones, to-day.
+
+Yet an impulse of rectitude impelled Miriam to give him what she still
+held to be a needless warning against an imaginary peril.
+
+"If you were wiser, Donatello, you would think me a dangerous person,"
+said she, "If you follow my footsteps, they will lead you to no good.
+You ought to be afraid of me."
+
+"I would as soon think of fearing the air we breathe," he replied.
+
+"And well you may, for it is full of malaria," said Miriam; she went on,
+hinting at an intangible confession, such as persons with overburdened
+hearts often make to children or dumb animals, or to holes in the earth,
+where they think their secrets may be at once revealed and buried.
+"Those who come too near me are in danger of great mischiefs, I do
+assure you. Take warning, therefore! It is a sad fatality that has
+brought you from your home among the Apennines,--some rusty old castle,
+I suppose, with a village at its foot, and an Arcadian environment of
+vineyards, fig-trees, and olive orchards,--a sad mischance, I say, that
+has transported you to my side. You have had a happy life hitherto, have
+you not, Donatello?"
+
+"O, yes," answered the young man; and, though not of a retrospective
+turn, he made the best effort he could to send his mind back into the
+past. "I remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at
+a village feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and the
+old, ripened wine, which our podere is famous for, in the cold winter
+evenings; and to devour great, luscious figs, and apricots, peaches,
+cherries, and melons. I was often happy in the woods, too, with hounds
+and horses, and very happy in watching all sorts, of creatures and birds
+that haunt the leafy solitudes. But never half so happy as now!"
+
+"In these delightful groves?" she asked.
+
+"Here, and with you," answered Donatello. "Just as we are now."
+
+"What a fulness of content in him! How silly, and how delightful!" said
+Miriam to herself. Then addressing him again: "But, Donatello, how long
+will this happiness last?"
+
+"How long!" he exclaimed; for it perplexed him even more to think of the
+future than to remember the past. "Why should it have any end? How long!
+Forever! forever! forever!"
+
+"The child! the simpleton!" said Miriam, with sudden laughter, and
+checking it as suddenly. "But is he a simpleton indeed? Here, in those
+few natural words, he has expressed that deep sense, that profound
+conviction of its own immortality, which genuine love never fails to
+bring. He perplexes me,--yes, and bewitches me,--wild, gentle, beautiful
+creature that he is! It is like playing with a young greyhound!"
+
+Her eyes filled with tears, at the same time that a smile shone out of
+them. Then first she became sensible of a delight and grief at once, in
+feeling this zephyr of a new affection, with its untainted freshness,
+blow over her weary, stifled heart, which had no right to be revived by
+it. The very exquisiteness of the enjoyment made her know that it ought
+to be a forbidden one.
+
+"Donatello," she hastily exclaimed, "for your own sake, leave me! It is
+not such a happy thing as you imagine it, to wander in these woods with
+me, a girl from another land, burdened with a doom that she tells to
+none. I might make you dread me,--perhaps hate me,--if I chose; and I
+must choose, if I find you loving me too well!"
+
+"I fear nothing!" said Donatello, looking into her unfathomable eyes
+with perfect trust. "I love always!"
+
+"I speak in vain," thought Miriam within herself.
+
+"Well, then, for this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me.
+To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality. My reality!
+what is it? Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable?
+Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that
+there can be no escape out of its dungeon? Be it so! There is, at
+least, that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as
+Donatello himself,--for this one hour!"
+
+And immediately she brightened up, as if an inward flame, heretofore
+stifled, were now permitted to fill her with its happy lustre, glowing
+through her cheeks and dancing in her eye-beams.
+
+Donatello, brisk and cheerful as he seemed before, showed a sensibility
+to Miriam's gladdened mood by breaking into still wilder and
+ever-varying activity. He frisked around her, bubbling over with joy,
+which clothed itself in words that had little individual meaning, and
+in snatches of song that seemed as natural as bird notes. Then they both
+laughed together, and heard their own laughter returning in the echoes,
+and laughed again at the response, so that the ancient and solemn grove
+became full of merriment for these two blithe spirits. A bird happening
+to sing cheerily, Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little
+feathered creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known
+him through many summers.
+
+"How close he stands to nature!" said Miriam, observing this pleasant
+familiarity between her companion and the bird. "He shall make me as
+natural as himself for this one hour."
+
+As they strayed through that sweet wilderness, she felt more and more
+the influence of his elastic temperament. Miriam was an impressible
+and impulsive creature, as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a
+melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about
+her waist, and kept in magic thraldom by the brooch that clasped it.
+Naturally, it is true, she was the more inclined to melancholy,
+yet fully capable of that high frolic of the spirits which richly
+compensates for many gloomy hours; if her soul was apt to lurk in the
+darkness of a cavern, she could sport madly in the sunshine before
+the cavern's mouth. Except the freshest mirth of animal spirits, like
+Donatello's, there is no merriment, no wild exhilaration, comparable to
+that of melancholy people escaping from the dark region in which it is
+their custom to keep themselves imprisoned.
+
+So the shadowy Miriam almost outdid Donatello on his own ground. They
+ran races with each other, side by side, with shouts and laughter; they
+pelted one another with early flowers, and gathering them up twined
+them with green leaves into garlands for both their heads. They played
+together like children, or creatures of immortal youth. So much had they
+flung aside the sombre habitudes of daily life, that they seemed born
+to be sportive forever, and endowed with eternal mirthfulness instead
+of any deeper joy. It was a glimpse far backward into Arcadian life, or,
+further still, into the Golden Age, before mankind was burdened with
+sin and sorrow, and before pleasure had been darkened with those shadows
+that bring it into high relief, and make it happiness.
+
+"Hark!" cried Donatello, stopping short, as he was about to bind
+Miriam's fair hands with flowers, and lead her along in triumph, "there
+is music somewhere in the grove!"
+
+"It is your kinsman, Pan, most likely," said Miriam, "playing on his
+pipe. Let us go seek him, and make him puff out his rough cheeks and
+pipe his merriest air! Come; the strain of music will guide us onward
+like a gayly colored thread of silk."
+
+"Or like a chain of flowers," responded Donatello, drawing her along by
+that which he had twined. "This way!--Come!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+THE SYLVAN DANCE
+
+
+As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,
+extemporizing new steps and attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace
+which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of
+days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was
+effaced from memory by another. In Miriam's motion, freely as she flung
+herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty;
+in Donatello's, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand
+in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter,
+and yet akin to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart. This was the
+ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan
+creature and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only
+this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.
+
+There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan
+character as perfectly as he. Catching glimpses of her, then, you would
+have fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance
+freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that
+which rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the
+pebbly bottom of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in
+the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly
+disappearing in a shower of rainbow drops.
+
+As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there
+were symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself
+out.
+
+"Ah! Donatello," cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath;
+"you have an unfair advantage over me! I am no true creature of the
+woods; while you are a real Faun, I do believe. When your curls shook
+just now, methought I had a peep at the pointed ears."
+
+Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught
+us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble
+person. Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face,
+as if he dreaded that a moment's pause might break the spell, and snatch
+away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many
+dreary months.
+
+"Dance! dance!" cried he joyously. "If we take breath, we shall be as
+we were yesterday. There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of
+trees. Dance, Miriam, dance!"
+
+They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of which there are many in
+that artfully constructed wilderness), set round with stone seats,
+on which the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself instead of
+cushions. On one of the stone benches sat the musicians, whose strains
+had enticed our wild couple thitherward. They proved to be a vagrant
+band, such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; comprising a harp,
+a flute, and a violin, which, though greatly the worse for wear,
+the performers had skill enough to provoke and modulate into tolerable
+harmony. It chanced to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in
+the sun-scorched piazzas of the city, or beneath the windows of some
+unresponsive palace, they had bethought themselves to try the echoes
+of these woods; for, on the festas of the Church, Rome scatters its
+merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the dance or any other pastime.
+
+As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians
+scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of
+instrument, more inspiringly than ever. A darkchecked little girl,
+with bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round
+with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without
+interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched
+away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head,
+produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step,
+and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one
+jovial act.
+
+It might be that there was magic in the sound, or contagion, at least,
+in the spirit which had got possession of Miriam and himself, for very
+soon a number of festal people were drawn to the spot, and struck
+into the dance, singly or in pairs, as if they were all gone mad with
+jollity. Among them were some of the plebeian damsels whom we meet
+bareheaded in the Roman streets, with silver stilettos thrust through
+their glossy hair; the contadinas, too, from the Campagna and the
+villages, with their rich and picturesque costumes of scarlet and all
+bright hues, such as fairer maidens might not venture to put on. Then
+came the modern Roman from Trastevere, perchance, with his old cloak
+drawn about him like a toga, which anon, as his active motion heated
+him, he flung aside. Three French soldiers capered freely into the
+throng, in wide scarlet trousers, their short swords dangling at their
+sides; and three German artists in gray flaccid hats and flaunting
+beards; and one of the Pope's Swiss guardsmen in the strange motley garb
+which Michael Angelo contrived for them. Two young English tourists (one
+of them a lord) took contadine partners and dashed in, as did also a
+shaggy man in goat-skin breeches, who looked like rustic Pan in person,
+and footed it as merrily as he. Besides the above there was a herdsman
+or two from the Campagna, and a few peasants in sky-blue jackets, and
+small-clothes tied with ribbons at the knees; haggard and sallow were
+these last, poor serfs, having little to eat and nothing but the malaria
+to breathe; but still they plucked up a momentary spirit and joined
+hands in Donatello's dance.
+
+Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again within the
+Precincts of this sunny glade, thawing mankind out of their cold
+formalities, releasing them from irksome restraint, mingling them
+together in such childlike gayety that new flowers (of which the old
+bosom of the earth is full) sprang up beneath their footsteps. The sole
+exception to the geniality of the moment, as we have understood, was
+seen in a countryman of our own, who sneered at the spectacle, and
+declined to compromise his dignity by making part of it.
+
+The harper thrummed with rapid fingers; the violin player flashed his
+bow back and forth across the strings; the flautist poured his breath in
+quick puffs of jollity, while Donatello shook the tambourine above his
+head, and led the merry throng with unweariable steps. As they followed
+one another in a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one
+of those bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals
+is twined around the circle of an antique vase; or it was like the
+sculptured scene on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as
+often as any other device, a festive procession mocks the ashes and
+white bones that are treasured up within. You might take it for a
+marriage pageant; but after a while, if you look at these merry-makers,
+following them from end to end of the marble coffin, you doubt whether
+their gay movement is leading them to a happy close. A youth has
+suddenly fallen in the dance; a chariot is overturned and broken,
+flinging the charioteer headlong to the ground; a maiden seems to have
+grown faint or weary, and is drooping on the bosom of a friend. Always
+some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust sidelong into the
+spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can look no more
+at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to this one
+slightly suggested doom and sorrow.
+
+As in its mirth, so in the darker characteristic here alluded to, there
+was an analogy between the sculptured scene on the sarcophagus and the
+wild dance which we have been describing. In the midst of its madness
+and riot Miriam found herself suddenly confronted by a strange figure
+that shook its fantastic garments in the air, and pranced before her on
+its tiptoes, almost vying with the agility of Donatello himself. It was
+the model.
+
+A moment afterwards Donatello was aware that she had retired from the
+dance. He hastened towards her, and flung himself on the grass beside
+the stone bench on which Miriam was sitting. But a strange distance and
+unapproachableness had all at once enveloped her; and though he saw her
+within reach of his arm, yet the light of her eyes seemed as far off as
+that of a star, nor was there any warmth in the melancholy smile with
+which she regarded him.
+
+"Come back!" cried he. "Why should this happy hour end so soon?"
+
+"It must end here, Donatello," said she, in answer to his words and
+outstretched hand; "and such hours, I believe, do not often repeat
+themselves in a lifetime. Let me go, my friend; let me vanish from you
+quietly among the shadows of these trees. See, the companions of our
+pastime are vanishing already!"
+
+Whether it was that the harp-strings were broken, the violin out of
+tune, or the flautist out of breath, so it chanced that the music had
+ceased, and the dancers come abruptly to a pause. All that motley throng
+of rioters was dissolved as suddenly as it had been drawn together. In
+Miriam's remembrance the scene had a character of fantasy. It was as if
+a company of satyrs, fauns, and nymphs, with Pan in the midst of them,
+had been disporting themselves in these venerable woods only a moment
+ago; and now in another moment, because some profane eye had looked at
+them too closely, or some intruder had cast a shadow on their mirth,
+the sylvan pageant had utterly disappeared. If a few of the merry-makers
+lingered among the trees, they had hidden their racy peculiarities under
+the garb and aspect of ordinary people, and sheltered themselves in the
+weary commonplace of daily life. Just an instant before it was Arcadia
+and the Golden Age. The spell being broken, it was now only that old
+tract of pleasure ground, close by the people's gate of Rome,--a
+tract where the crimes and calamities of ages, the many battles, blood
+recklessly poured out, and deaths of myriads, have corrupted all the
+soil, creating an influence that makes the air deadly to human lungs.
+
+"You must leave me," said Miriam to Donatello more imperatively than
+before; "have I not said it? Go; and look not behind you."
+
+"Miriam," whispered Donatello, grasping her hand forcibly, "who is it
+that stands in the shadow yonder, beckoning you to follow him?"
+
+"Hush; leave me!" repeated Miriam. "Your hour is past; his hour has
+come."
+
+Donatello still gazed in the direction which he had indicated, and
+the expression of his face was fearfully changed, being so disordered,
+perhaps with terror,--at all events with anger and invincible
+repugnance,--that Miriam hardly knew him. His lips were drawn apart so
+as to disclose his set teeth, thus giving him a look of animal rage,
+which we seldom see except in persons of the simplest and rudest
+natures. A shudder seemed to pass through his very bones.
+
+"I hate him!" muttered he.
+
+"Be satisfied; I hate him too!" said Miriam.
+
+She had no thought of making this avowal, but was irresistibly drawn to
+it by the sympathy of the dark emotion in her own breast with that so
+strongly expressed by Donatello. Two drops of water or of blood do not
+more naturally flow into each other than did her hatred into his.
+
+"Shall I clutch him by the throat?" whispered Donatello, with a savage
+scowl. "Bid me do so, and we are rid of him forever."
+
+"In Heaven's name, no violence!" exclaimed Miriam, affrighted out of the
+scornful control which she had hitherto held over her companion, by
+the fierceness that he so suddenly developed. "O, have pity on
+me, Donatello, if for nothing else, yet because in the midst of my
+wretchedness I let myself be your playmate for this one wild
+hour! Follow me no farther. Henceforth leave me to my doom. Dear
+friend,--kind, simple, loving friend,--make me not more wretched by the
+remembrance of having thrown fierce hates or loves into the wellspring
+of your happy life!"
+
+"Not follow you!" repeated Donatello, soothed from anger into sorrow,
+less by the purport of what she said, than by the melancholy sweetness
+of her voice,--"not follow you! What other path have I?"
+
+"We will talk of it once again," said Miriam still soothingly;
+"soon--to-morrow when you will; only leave me now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
+
+
+In the Borghese Grove, so recently uproarious with merriment and music,
+there remained only Miriam and her strange follower.
+
+A solitude had suddenly spread itself around them. It perhaps symbolized
+a peculiar character in the relation of these two, insulating them, and
+building up an insuperable barrier between their life-streams and other
+currents, which might seem to flow in close vicinity. For it is one of
+the chief earthly incommodities of some species of misfortune, or of a
+great crime, that it makes the actor in the one, or the sufferer of
+the other, an alien in the world, by interposing a wholly unsympathetic
+medium betwixt himself and those whom he yearns to meet.
+
+Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement,--this chill remoteness of
+their position,--there have come to us but a few vague whisperings
+of what passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the sinister
+personage who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the
+catacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we
+undertake a task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up
+and piecing together the fragments ora letter which has been torn and
+scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance, many entire
+sentences, and those possibly the most important ones, have flown
+too far on the winged breeze to be recovered. If we insert our own
+conjectural amendments, we perhaps give a purport utterly at variance
+with the true one. Yet unless we attempt something in this way,
+there must remain an unsightly gap, and a lack of continuousness
+and dependence in our narrative; so that it would arrive at certain
+inevitable catastrophes without due warning of their imminence.
+
+Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious
+fascination in the influence of this ill-omened person over Miriam;
+it was such as beasts and reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimes
+exercise upon their victims. Marvellous it was to see the hopelessness
+with which being naturally of so courageous a spirit she resigned
+herself to the thraldom in which he held her. That iron chain, of which
+some of the massive links were round her feminine waist, and the others
+in his ruthless hand,--or which, perhaps, bound the pair together by
+a bond equally torturing to each,--must have been forged in some such
+unhallowed furnace as is only kindled by evil passions, and fed by evil
+deeds.
+
+Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in Miriam, but only
+one of those fatalities which are among the most insoluble riddles
+propounded to mortal comprehension; the fatal decree by which every
+crime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons, as well as of
+the single guilty one.
+
+It was, at any rate, but a feeble and despairing kind of remonstrance
+which she had now the energy to oppose against his persecution.
+
+"You follow me too closely," she said, in low, faltering accents; "you
+allow me too scanty room to draw my breath. Do you know what will be the
+end of this?" "I know well what must be the end," he replied.
+
+"Tell me, then," said Miriam, "that I may compare your foreboding with
+my own. Mine is a very dark one."
+
+"There can be but one result, and that soon," answered the model. "You
+must throw off your present mask and assume another. You must vanish out
+of the scene: quit Rome with me, and leave no trace whereby to follow
+you. It is in my power, as you well know, to compel your acquiescence in
+my bidding. You are aware of the penalty of a refusal."
+
+"Not that penalty with which you would terrify me," said Miriam;
+"another there may be, but not so grievous." "What is that other?"
+he inquired. "Death! simply death!" she answered. "Death," said her
+persecutor, "is not so simple and opportune a thing as you imagine. You
+are strong and warm with life. Sensitive and irritable as your spirit
+is, these many months of trouble, this latter thraldom in which I hold
+you, have scarcely made your cheek paler than I saw it in your girlhood.
+Miriam,--for I forbear to speak another name, at which these leaves
+would shiver above our heads,--Miriam, you cannot die!"
+
+"Might not a dagger find my heart?" said she, for the first time meeting
+his eyes. "Would not poison make an end of me? Will not the Tiber drown
+me?"
+
+"It might," he answered; "for I allow that you are mortal. But, Miriam,
+believe me, it is not your fate to die while there remains so much to be
+sinned and suffered in the world. We have a destiny which we must needs
+fulfil together. I, too, have struggled to escape it. I was as anxious
+as yourself to break the tie between us,--to bury the past in a
+fathomless grave,--to make it impossible that we should ever meet, until
+you confront me at the bar of Judgment! You little can imagine what
+steps I took to render all this secure; and what was the result?
+Our strange interview in the bowels of the earth convinced me of the
+futility of my design."
+
+"Ah, fatal chance!" cried Miriam, covering her face with her hands.
+
+"Yes, your heart trembled with horror when you recognized me," rejoined
+he; "but you did not guess that there was an equal horror in my own!"
+
+"Why would not the weight of earth above our heads have crumbled down
+upon us both, forcing us apart, but burying us equally?" cried Miriam,
+in a burst of vehement passion. "O, that we could have wandered in those
+dismal passages till we both perished, taking opposite paths in the
+darkness, so that when we lay down to die, our last breaths might not
+mingle!"
+
+"It were vain to wish it," said the model. "In all that labyrinth of
+midnight paths, we should have found one another out to live or die
+together. Our fates cross and are entangled. The threads are twisted
+into a strong cord, which is dragging us to an evil doom. Could the
+knots be severed, we might escape. But neither can your slender fingers
+untie these knots, nor my masculine force break them. We must submit!"
+
+"Pray for rescue, as I have," exclaimed Miriam. "Pray for deliverance
+from me, since I am your evil genius, as you mine. Dark as your life has
+been, I have known you to pray in times past!"
+
+At these words of Miriam, a tremor and horror appeared to seize upon her
+persecutor, insomuch that he shook and grew ashy pale before her eyes.
+In this man's memory there was something that made it awful for him to
+think of prayer; nor would any torture be more intolerable than to be
+reminded of such divine comfort and succor as await pious souls
+merely for the asking; This torment was perhaps the token of a native
+temperament deeply susceptible of religious impressions, but which had
+been wronged, violated, and debased, until, at length, it was capable
+only of terror from the sources that were intended for our purest and
+loftiest consolation. He looked so fearfully at her, and with such
+intense pain struggling in his eyes, that Miriam felt pity.
+
+And now, all at once, it struck her that he might be mad. It was an idea
+that had never before seriously occurred to her mind, although, as soon
+as suggested, it fitted marvellously into many circumstances that
+lay within her knowledge. But, alas! such was her evil fortune, that,
+whether mad or no, his power over her remained the same, and was likely
+to be used only the more tyrannously, if exercised by a lunatic.
+
+"I would not give you pain," she said, soothingly; "your faith allows you
+the consolations of penance and absolution. Try what help there may be
+in these, and leave me to myself."
+
+"Do not think it, Miriam," said he; "we are bound together, and can
+never part again." "Why should it seem so impossible?" she rejoined.
+"Think how I had escaped from all the past! I had made for myself a
+new sphere, and found new friends, new occupations, new hopes and
+enjoyments. My heart, methinks, was almost as unburdened as if there had
+been no miserable life behind me. The human spirit does not perish of a
+single wound, nor exhaust itself in a single trial of life. Let us
+but keep asunder, and all may go well for both." "We fancied ourselves
+forever sundered," he replied. "Yet we met once, in the bowels of the
+earth; and, were we to part now, our fates would fling us together again
+in a desert, on a mountain-top, or in whatever spot seemed safest. You
+speak in vain, therefore."
+
+"You mistake your own will for an iron necessity," said Miriam;
+"otherwise, you might have suffered me to glide past you like a ghost,
+when we met among those ghosts of ancient days. Even now you might bid
+me pass as freely."
+
+"Never!" said he, with unmitigable will; "your reappearance has
+destroyed the work of years. You know the power that I have over you.
+Obey my bidding; or, within a short time, it shall be exercised: nor
+will I cease to haunt you till the moment comes."
+
+"Then," said Miriam more calmly, "I foresee the end, and have already
+warned you of it. It will be death!"
+
+"Your own death, Miriam,--or mine?" he asked, looking fixedly at her.
+
+"Do you imagine me a murderess?" said she, shuddering; "you, at least,
+have no right to think me so!"
+
+"Yet," rejoined he, with a glance of dark meaning, "men have said that
+this white hand had once a crimson stain." He took her hand as he spoke,
+and held it in his own, in spite of the repugnance, amounting to nothing
+short of agony, with which she struggled to regain it. Holding it up
+to the fading light (for there was already dimness among the trees),
+he appeared to examine it closely, as if to discover the imaginary
+blood-stain with which he taunted her. He smiled as he let it go. "It
+looks very white," said he; "but I have known hands as white, which all
+the water in the ocean would not have washed clean."
+
+"It had no stain," retorted Miriam bitterly, "until you grasped it in
+your own."
+
+The wind has blown away whatever else they may have spoken.
+
+They went together towards the town, and, on their way, continued to
+make reference, no doubt, to some strange and dreadful history of their
+former life, belonging equally to this dark man and to the fair and
+youthful woman whom he persecuted. In their words, or in the breath that
+uttered them, there seemed to be an odor of guilt, and a scent of blood.
+Yet, how can we imagine that a stain of ensanguined crime should attach
+to Miriam! Or how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence be
+subjected to a thraldom like that which she endured from the spectre,
+whom she herself had evoked out of the darkness! Be this as it might,
+Miriam, we have reason to believe, still continued to beseech him,
+humbly, passionately, wildly, only to go his way, and leave her free to
+follow her own sad path.
+
+Thus they strayed onward through the green wilderness of the Borghese
+grounds, and soon came near the city wall, where, had Miriam raised her
+eyes, she might have seen Hilda and the sculptor leaning on the parapet.
+But she walked in a mist of trouble, and could distinguish little beyond
+its limits. As they came within public observation, her persecutor fell
+behind, throwing off the imperious manner which he had assumed during
+their solitary interview. The Porta del Popolo swarmed with life. The
+merry-makers, who had spent the feast-day outside the walls, were now
+thronging in; a party of horsemen were entering beneath the arch; a
+travelling carriage had been drawn up just within the verge, and was
+passing through the villainous ordeal of the papal custom-house. In the
+broad piazza, too, there was a motley crowd.
+
+But the stream of Miriam's trouble kept its way through this flood of
+human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside. With a sad
+kind of feminine ingenuity, she found a way to kneel before her tyrant
+undetected, though in full sight of all the people, still beseeching him
+for freedom, and in vain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
+
+
+Hilda, after giving the last touches to the picture of Beatrice Cenci,
+had flown down from her dove-cote, late in the afternoon, and gone to
+the Pincian Hill, in the hope of hearing a strain or two of exhilarating
+music. There, as it happened, she met the sculptor, for, to say the
+truth, Kenyon had well noted the fair artist's ordinary way of life,
+and was accustomed to shape his own movements so as to bring him often
+within her sphere.
+
+The Pincian Hill is the favorite promenade of the Roman aristocracy. At
+the present day, however, like most other Roman possessions, it belongs
+less to the native inhabitants than to the barbarians from Gaul, Great
+Britain, anti beyond the sea, who have established a peaceful usurpation
+over whatever is enjoyable or memorable in the Eternal City. These
+foreign guests are indeed ungrateful, if they do not breathe a prayer
+for Pope Clement, or whatever Holy Father it may have been, who levelled
+the summit of the mount so skilfully, and bounded it with the parapet of
+the city wall; who laid out those broad walks and drives, and overhung
+them with the deepening shade of many kinds of tree; who scattered the
+flowers, of all seasons and of every clime, abundantly over those green,
+central lawns; who scooped out hollows in fit places, and, setting great
+basins of marble in them, caused ever-gushing fountains to fill them to
+the brim; who reared up the immemorial obelisk out of the soil that had
+long hidden it; who placed pedestals along the borders of the avenues,
+and crowned them with busts of that multitude of worthies--statesmen,
+heroes, artists, men of letters and of song--whom the whole world claims
+as its chief ornaments, though Italy produced them all. In a word, the
+Pincian garden is one of the things that reconcile the stranger (since
+he fully appreciates the enjoyment, and feels nothing of the cost) to
+the rule of an irresponsible dynasty of Holy Fathers, who seem to have
+aimed at making life as agreeable an affair as it can well be.
+
+In this pleasant spot, the red-trousered French soldiers are always to
+be seen; bearded and grizzled veterans, perhaps with medals of Algiers
+or the Crimea on their breasts. To them is assigned the peaceful duty of
+seeing that children do not trample on the flower beds, nor any youthful
+lover rifle them of their fragrant blossoms to stick in the beloved
+one's hair. Here sits (drooping upon some marble bench, in the
+treacherous sunshine) the consumptive girl, whose friends have brought
+her, for cure, to a climate that instils poison into its very purest
+breath. Here, all day, come nursery-maids, burdened with rosy English
+babies, or guiding the footsteps of little travellers from the far
+Western world. Here, in the sunny afternoons, roll and rumble all kinds
+of equipages, from the cardinal's old-fashioned and gorgeous purple
+carriage to the gay barouche of modern date. Here horsemen gallop on
+thoroughbred steeds. Here, in short, all the transitory population of
+Rome, the world's great watering-place, rides, drives, or promenades!
+Here are beautiful sunsets; and here, whichever way you turn your eyes,
+are scenes as well worth gazing at, both in themselves and for their
+historic interest, as any that the sun ever rose and set upon. Here,
+too, on certain afternoons of the week, a French military band flings
+out rich music over the poor old city, floating her with strains as loud
+as those of her own echoless triumphs.
+
+Hilda and the sculptor (by the contrivance of the latter, who loved best
+to be alone with his young countrywoman) had wandered beyond the throng
+of promenaders, whom they left in a dense cluster around the music. They
+strayed, indeed, to the farthest point of the Pincian Hill, and leaned
+over the parapet, looking down upon the Muro Torto, a massive fragment
+of the oldest Roman wall, which juts over, as if ready to tumble down
+by its own weight, yet seems still the most indestructible piece of work
+that men's hands ever piled together. In the blue distance rose Soracte,
+and other heights, which have gleamed afar, to our imaginations, but
+look scarcely real to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed about so
+much, they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream.
+These, nevertheless, are the solid framework of hills that shut in Rome,
+and its wide surrounding Campagna,--no land of dreams, but the broadest
+page of history, crowded so full with memorable events that one
+obliterates another; as if Time had crossed and recrossed his own
+records till they grew illegible.
+
+But, not to meddle with history,--with which our narrative is no
+otherwise concerned, than that the very dust of Rome is historic, and
+inevitably settles on our page and mingles with our ink,--we will return
+to our two friends, who were still leaning over the wall. Beneath them
+lay the broad sweep of the Borghese grounds, covered with trees, amid
+which appeared the white gleam of pillars and statues, and the flash of
+an upspringing fountain, all to be overshadowed at a later period of the
+year by the thicker growth of foliage.
+
+The advance of vegetation, in this softer climate, is less abrupt than
+the inhabitant of the cold North is accustomed to observe. Beginning
+earlier,--even in February,--Spring is not compelled to burst into
+Summer with such headlong haste; there is time to dwell upon each
+opening beauty, and to enjoy the budding leaf, the tender green, the
+sweet youth and freshness of the year; it gives us its maiden charm,
+before, settling into the married Summer, which, again, does not so soon
+sober itself into matronly Autumn. In our own country, the virgin Spring
+hastens to its bridal too abruptly. But here, after a month or two of
+kindly growth, the leaves of the young trees, which cover that portion
+of the Borghese grounds nearest the city wall, were still in their
+tender half-development.
+
+In the remoter depths, among the old groves of ilex-trees, Hilda and
+Kenyon heard the faint sound of music, laughter, and mingling voices. It
+was probably the uproar--spreading even so far as the walls of Rome,
+and growing faded and melancholy in its passage--of that wild sylvan
+merriment, which we have already attempted to describe. By and by it
+ceased--although the two listeners still tried to distinguish it between
+the bursts of nearer music from the military band. But there was no
+renewal of that distant mirth. Soon afterwards they saw a solitary
+figure advancing along one of the paths that lead from the obscurer part
+of the ground towards the gateway.
+
+"Look! is it not Donatello?" said Hilda.
+
+"He it is, beyond a doubt," replied the sculptor. "But how gravely he
+walks, and with what long looks behind him! He seems either very weary,
+or very sad. I should not hesitate to call it sadness, if Donatello were
+a creature capable of the sin and folly of low spirits. In all these
+hundred paces, while we have been watching him, he has not made one
+of those little caprioles in the air which are characteristic of his
+natural gait. I begin to doubt whether he is a veritable Faun."
+
+"Then," said Hilda, with perfect simplicity, "you have thought him--and
+do think him--one of that strange, wild, happy race of creatures, that
+used to laugh and sport in the woods, in the old, old times? So do
+I, indeed! But I never quite believed, till now, that fauns existed
+anywhere but in poetry."
+
+The sculptor at first merely smiled. Then, as the idea took further
+possession of his mind, he laughed outright, and wished from the bottom
+of his heart (being in love with Hilda, though he had never told her
+so) that he could have rewarded or punished her for its pretty absurdity
+with a kiss.
+
+"O Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide
+under that little straw hat!" cried he, at length. "A Faun! a Faun!
+Great Pan is not dead, then, after all! The whole tribe of mythical
+creatures yet live in the moonlit seclusion of a young girl's fancy,
+and find it a lovelier abode and play-place, I doubt not, than their
+Arcadian haunts of yore. What bliss, if a man of marble, like myself,
+could stray thither, too!"
+
+"Why do you laugh so?" asked Hilda, reddening; for she was a little
+disturbed at Kenyon's ridicule, however kindly expressed. "What can I
+have said, that you think so very foolish?"
+
+"Well, not foolish, then," rejoined the sculptor, "but wiser, it may
+be, than I can fathom. Really, however, the idea does strike one as
+delightfully fresh, when we consider Donatello's position and external
+environment. Why, my dear Hilda, he is a Tuscan born, of an old noble
+race in that part of Italy; and he has a moss-grown tower among the
+Apennines, where he and his forefathers have dwelt, under their own
+vines and fig-trees, from an unknown antiquity. His boyish passion
+for Miriam has introduced him familiarly to our little circle; and our
+republican and artistic simplicity of intercourse has included this
+young Italian, on the same terms as one of ourselves. But, if we
+paid due respect to rank and title, we should bend reverentially to
+Donatello, and salute him as his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni."
+
+"That is a droll idea, much droller than his being a Faun!" said
+Hilda, laughing in her turn. "This does not quite satisfy me, however,
+especially as you yourself recognized and acknowledged his wonderful
+resemblance to the statue."
+
+"Except as regards the pointed ears," said Kenyon; adding, aside, "and
+one other little peculiarity, generally observable in the statues of
+fauns."
+
+"As for his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni's ears," replied Hilda,
+smiling again at the dignity with which this title invested their
+playful friend, "you know we could never see their shape, on account of
+his clustering curls. Nay, I remember, he once started back, as shyly as
+a wild deer, when Miriam made a pretence of examining them. How do you
+explain that?"
+
+"O, I certainly shall not contend against such a weight of evidence,
+the fact of his faunship being otherwise so probable," answered the
+sculptor, still hardly retaining his gravity. "Faun or not, Donatello or
+the Count di Monte Beni--is a singularly wild creature, and, as I have
+remarked on other occasions, though very gentle, does not love to be
+touched. Speaking in no harsh sense, there is a great deal of animal
+nature in him, as if he had been born in the woods, and had run wild all
+his childhood, and were as yet but imperfectly domesticated. Life, even
+in our day, is very simple and unsophisticated in some of the shaggy
+nooks of the Apennines."
+
+"It annoys me very much," said Hilda, "this inclination, which
+most people have, to explain away the wonder and the mystery out
+of everything. Why could not you allow me--and yourself, too--the
+satisfaction of thinking him a Faun?"
+
+"Pray keep your belief, dear Hilda, if it makes you any happier," said
+the sculptor; "and I shall do my best to become a convert. Donatello has
+asked me to spend the summer with him, in his ancestral tower, where
+I purpose investigating the pedigree of these sylvan counts, his
+forefathers; and if their shadows beckon me into dreamland, I shall
+willingly follow. By the bye, speaking of Donatello, there is a point on
+which I should like to be enlightened."
+
+"Can I help you, then?" said Hilda, in answer to his look.
+
+"Is there the slightest chance of his winning Miriam's affections?"
+suggested Kenyon.
+
+"Miriam! she, so accomplished and gifted!" exclaimed Hilda; "and he, a
+rude, uncultivated boy! No, no, no!"
+
+"It would seem impossible," said the sculptor. "But, on the other hand,
+a gifted woman flings away her affections so unaccountably, sometimes!
+Miriam of late has been very morbid and miserable, as we both know.
+Young as she is, the morning light seems already to have faded out of
+her life; and now comes Donatello, with natural sunshine enough for
+himself and her, and offers her the opportunity of making her heart and
+life all new and cheery again. People of high intellectual endowments do
+not require similar ones in those they love. They are just the persons
+to appreciate the wholesome gush of natural feeling, the honest
+affection, the simple joy, the fulness of contentment with what
+he loves, which Miriam sees in Donatello. True; she may call him a
+simpleton. It is a necessity of the case; for a man loses the capacity
+for this kind of affection, in proportion as he cultivates and refines
+himself."
+
+"Dear me!" said Hilda, drawing imperceptibly away from her companion.
+"Is this the penalty of refinement? Pardon me; I do not believe it.
+It is because you are a sculptor, that you think nothing can be finely
+wrought except it be cold and hard, like the marble in which your ideas
+take shape. I am a painter, and know that the most delicate beauty may
+be softened and warmed throughout."
+
+"I said a foolish thing, indeed," answered the sculptor. "It surprises
+me, for I might have drawn a wiser knowledge out of my own experience.
+It is the surest test of genuine love, that it brings back our early
+simplicity to the worldliest of us."
+
+Thus talking, they loitered slowly along beside the parapet which
+borders the level summit of the Pincian with its irregular sweep. At
+intervals they looked through the lattice-work of their thoughts at the
+varied prospects that lay before and beneath them.
+
+From the terrace where they now stood there is an abrupt descent towards
+the Piazza del Popolo; and looking down into its broad space they
+beheld the tall palatial edifices, the church domes, and the ornamented
+gateway, which grew and were consolidated out of the thought of Michael
+Angelo. They saw, too, the red granite obelisk, oldest of things,
+even in Rome, which rises in the centre of the piazza, with a fourfold
+fountain at its base. All Roman works and ruins (whether of the
+empire, the far-off republic, or the still more distant kings) assume a
+transient, visionary, and impalpable character when we think that this
+indestructible monument supplied one of the recollections which Moses
+and the Israelites bore from Egypt into the desert. Perchance, on
+beholding the cloudy pillar and the fiery column, they whispered
+awestricken to one another, "In its shape it is like that old obelisk
+which we and our fathers have so often seen on the borders of the Nile."
+And now that very obelisk, with hardly a trace of decay upon it, is the
+first thing that the modern traveller sees after entering the Flaminian
+Gate!
+
+Lifting their eyes, Hilda and her companion gazed westward, and saw
+beyond the invisible Tiber the Castle of St. Angelo; that immense tomb
+of a pagan emperor, with the archangel at its summit.
+
+Still farther off appeared a mighty pile of buildings, surmounted by the
+vast dome, which all of us have shaped and swelled outward, like a huge
+bubble, to the utmost Scope of our imaginations, long before we see it
+floating over the worship of the city. It may be most worthily seen
+from precisely the point where our two friends were now standing. At
+any nearer view the grandeur of St. Peter's hides itself behind the
+immensity of its separate parts,--so that we see only the front, only
+the sides, only the pillared length and loftiness of the portico, and
+not the mighty whole. But at this distance the entire outline of the
+world's cathedral, as well as that of the palace of the world's
+chief priest, is taken in at once. In such remoteness, moreover, the
+imagination is not debarred from lending its assistance, even while
+we have the reality before our eyes, and helping the weakness of human
+sense to do justice to so grand an object. It requires both faith and
+fancy to enable us to feel, what is nevertheless so true, that yonder,
+in front of the purple outline of hills, is the grandest edifice ever
+built by man, painted against God's loveliest sky.
+
+After contemplating a little while a scene which their long residence in
+Rome had made familiar to them, Kenyon and Hilda again let their glances
+fall into the piazza at their feet. They there beheld Miriam, who had
+just entered the Porta del Popolo, and was standing by the obelisk and
+fountain. With a gesture that impressed Kenyon as at once suppliant and
+imperious, she seemed to intimate to a figure which had attended her
+thus far, that it was now her desire to be left alone. The pertinacious
+model, however, remained immovable.
+
+And the sculptor here noted a circumstance, which, according to the
+interpretation he might put upon it, was either too trivial to be
+mentioned, or else so mysteriously significant that he found it
+difficult to believe his eyes. Miriam knelt down on the steps of the
+fountain; so far there could be no question of the fact. To other
+observers, if any there were, she probably appeared to take this
+attitude merely for the convenience of dipping her fingers into the gush
+of water from the mouth of one of the stone lions. But as she clasped
+her hands together after thus bathing them, and glanced upward at the
+model, an idea took strong possession of Kenyon's mind that Miriam was
+kneeling to this dark follower there in the world's face!
+
+"Do you see it?" he said to Hilda.
+
+"See what?" asked she, surprised at the emotion of his tone. "I see
+Miriam, who has just bathed her hands in that delightfully cool water. I
+often dip my fingers into a Roman fountain, and think of the brook that
+used to be one of my playmates in my New England village."
+
+"I fancied I saw something else," said Kenyon; "but it was doubtless a
+mistake."
+
+But, allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden
+significance of Miriam's gesture, what a terrible thraldom did it
+suggest! Free as she seemed to be,--beggar as he looked,--the nameless
+vagrant must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets
+of Rome, fettered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of
+yore following in an emperor's triumph. And was it conceivable that
+she would have been thus enthralled unless some great error--how great
+Kenyon dared not think--or some fatal weakness had given this dark
+adversary a vantage ground?
+
+"Hilda," said he abruptly, "who and what is Miriam? Pardon me; but are
+you sure of her?"
+
+"Sure of her!" repeated Hilda, with an angry blush, for her friend's
+sake. "I am sure that she is kind, good, and generous; a true and
+faithful friend, whom I love dearly, and who loves me as well! What more
+than this need I be sure of?"
+
+"And your delicate instincts say all this in her favor?--nothing against
+her?" continued the sculptor, without heeding the irritation of Hilda's
+tone. "These are my own impressions, too. But she is such a mystery!
+We do not even know whether she is a countrywoman of ours, or an
+Englishwoman, or a German. There is Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins, one
+would say, and a right English accent on her tongue, but much that is
+not English breeding, nor American. Nowhere else but in Rome, and as an
+artist, could she hold a place in society without giving some clew to
+her past life."
+
+"I love her dearly," said Hilda, still with displeasure in her tone,
+"and trust her most entirely."
+
+"My heart trusts her at least, whatever my head may do," replied Kenyon;
+"and Rome is not like one of our New England villages, where we need the
+permission of each individual neighbor for every act that we do, every
+word that we utter, and every friend that we make or keep. In these
+particulars the papal despotism allows us freer breath than our native
+air; and if we like to take generous views of our associates, we can do
+so, to a reasonable extent, without ruining ourselves."
+
+"The music has ceased," said Hilda; "I am going now."
+
+There are three streets that, beginning close beside each other, diverge
+from the Piazza del Popolo towards the heart of Rome: on the left, the
+Via del Babuino; on the right, the Via della Ripetta; and between these
+two that world-famous avenue, the Corso. It appeared that Miriam and her
+strange companion were passing up the first mentioned of these three,
+and were soon hidden from Hilda and the sculptor.
+
+The two latter left the Pincian by the broad and stately walk that
+skirts along its brow. Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt
+descent, the city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen
+roofs, above which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, beside
+here and there a tower, and the upper windows of some taller or higher
+situated palace, looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a
+distance, ascending out of the central mass of edifices, they could see
+the top of the Antonine column, and near it the circular roof of the
+Pantheon looking heavenward with its ever-open eye.
+
+Except these two objects, almost everything that they beheld was
+mediaeval, though built, indeed, of the massive old stones and
+indestructible bricks of imperial Rome; for the ruins of the Coliseum,
+the Golden House, and innumerable temples of Roman gods, and mansions of
+Caesars and senators, had supplied the material for all those gigantic
+hovels, and their walls were cemented with mortar of inestimable cost,
+being made of precious antique statues, burnt long ago for this petty
+purpose.
+
+Rome, as it now exists, has grown up under the Popes, and seems like
+nothing but a heap of broken rubbish, thrown into the great chasm
+between our own days and the Empire, merely to fill it up; and, for the
+better part of two thousand years, its annals of obscure policies,
+and wars, and continually recurring misfortunes, seem also but broken
+rubbish, as compared with its classic history.
+
+If we consider the present city as at all connected with the famous one
+of old, it is only because we find it built over its grave. A depth of
+thirty feet of soil has covered up the Rome of ancient days, so that it
+lies like the dead corpse of a giant, decaying for centuries, with no
+survivor mighty enough even to bury it, until the dust of all those
+years has gathered slowly over its recumbent form and made a casual
+sepulchre.
+
+We know not how to characterize, in any accordant and compatible
+terms, the Rome that lies before us; its sunless alleys, and streets
+of palaces; its churches, lined with the gorgeous marbles that were
+originally polished for the adornment of pagan temples; its thousands of
+evil smells, mixed up with fragrance of rich incense, diffused from as
+many censers; its little life, deriving feeble nutriment from what
+has long been dead. Everywhere, some fragment of ruin suggesting the
+magnificence of a former epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,--and
+nastiness at the foot of it. As the sum of all, there are recollections
+that kindle the soul, and a gloom and languor that depress it beyond any
+depth of melancholic sentiment that can be elsewhere known.
+
+Yet how is it possible to say an unkind or irreverential word of Rome?
+The city of all time, and of all the world! The spot for which man's
+great life and deeds have done so much, and for which decay has done
+whatever glory and dominion could not do! At this moment, the evening
+sunshine is flinging its golden mantle over it, making all that we
+thought mean magnificent; the bells of all the churches suddenly ring
+out, as if it were a peal of triumph because Rome is still imperial.
+
+"I sometimes fancy," said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene
+always made a strong impression, "that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd
+everything else out of my heart."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated the sculptor. They had now reached the grand
+stairs that ascend from the Piazza di Spagna to the hither brow of the
+Pincian Hill. Old Beppo, the millionnaire of his ragged fraternity,
+it is a wonder that no artist paints him as the cripple whom St. Peter
+heals at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,--was just mounting his donkey
+to depart, laden with the rich spoil of the day's beggary.
+
+Up the stairs, drawing his tattered cloak about his face, came the
+model, at whom Beppo looked askance, jealous of an encroacher on his
+rightful domain. The figure passed away, however, up the Via Sistina. In
+the piazza below, near the foot of the magnificent steps, stood Miriam,
+with her eyes bent on the ground, as if she were counting those
+little, square, uncomfortable paving-stones, that make it a penitential
+pilgrimage to walk in Rome. She kept this attitude for several minutes,
+and when, at last, the importunities of a beggar disturbed her from it,
+she seemed bewildered and pressed her hand upon her brow.
+
+"She has been in some sad dream or other, poor thing!" said Kenyon
+sympathizingly; "and even now she is imprisoned there in a kind of cage,
+the iron bars of which are made of her own thoughts."
+
+"I fear she is not well," said Hilda. "I am going down the stairs, and
+will join Miriam."
+
+"Farewell, then," said the sculptor. "Dear Hilda, this is a perplexed
+and troubled world! It soothes me inexpressibly to think of you in your
+tower, with white doves and white thoughts for your companions, so high
+above us all, and With the Virgin for your household friend. You know
+not how far it throws its light, that lamp which you keep burning at her
+shrine! I passed beneath the tower last night, and the ray cheered me,
+because you lighted it."
+
+"It has for me a religious significance," replied Hilda quietly, "and
+yet I am no Catholic."
+
+They parted, and Kenyon made haste along the Via Sistina, in the hope
+of overtaking the model, whose haunts and character he was anxious to
+investigate, for Miriam's sake. He fancied that he saw him a long way
+in advance, but before he reached the Fountain of the Triton the dusky
+figure had vanished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+A SCULPTOR'S STUDIO
+
+
+About this period, Miriam seems to have been goaded by a weary
+restlessness that drove her abroad on any errand or none. She went one
+morning to visit Kenyon in his studio, whither he had invited her to
+see a new statue, on which he had staked many hopes, and which was now
+almost completed in the clay. Next to Hilda, the person for whom
+Miriam felt most affection and confidence was Kenyon; and in all the
+difficulties that beset her life, it was her impulse to draw near Hilda
+for feminine sympathy, and the sculptor for brotherly counsel.
+
+Yet it was to little purpose that she approached the edge of the
+voiceless gulf between herself and them. Standing on the utmost verge of
+that dark chasm, she might stretch out her hand, and never clasp a hand
+of theirs; she might strive to call out, "Help, friends! help!" but, as
+with dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in
+the remoteness that seemed such a little way. This perception of an
+infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to
+human beings to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly
+shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results of any accident,
+misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that puts an individual
+ajar with the world. Very often, as in Miriam's case, there is an
+insatiable instinct that demands friendship, love, and intimate
+communion, but is forced to pine in empty forms; a hunger of the heart,
+which finds only shadows to feed upon.
+
+Kenyon's studio was in a cross-street, or, rather, an ugly and dirty
+little lane, between the Corso and the Via della Ripetta; and though
+chill, narrow, gloomy, and bordered with tall and shabby structures,
+the lane was not a whit more disagreeable than nine tenths of the Roman
+streets. Over the door of one of the houses was a marble tablet, bearing
+an inscription, to the purport that the sculpture-rooms within had
+formerly been occupied by the illustrious artist Canova. In these
+precincts (which Canova's genius was not quite of a character to render
+sacred, though it certainly made them interesting) the young American
+sculptor had now established himself.
+
+The studio of a sculptor is generally but a rough and dreary-looking
+place, with a good deal the aspect, indeed, of a stone-mason's workshop.
+Bare floors of brick or plank, and plastered walls,--an old chair
+or two, or perhaps only a block of marble (containing, however, the
+possibility of ideal grace within it) to sit down upon; some hastily
+scrawled sketches of nude figures on the whitewash of the wall. These
+last are probably the sculptor's earliest glimpses of ideas that may
+hereafter be solidified into imperishable stone, or perhaps may remain
+as impalpable as a dream. Next there are a few very roughly modelled
+little figures in clay or plaster, exhibiting the second stage of the
+idea as it advances towards a marble immortality; and then is seen the
+exquisitely designed shape of clay, more interesting than even the
+final marble, as being the intimate production of the sculptor himself,
+moulded throughout with his loving hands, and nearest to his imagination
+and heart. In the plaster-cast, from this clay model, the beauty of
+the statue strangely disappears, to shine forth again with pure white
+radiance, in the precious marble of Carrara. Works in all these stages
+of advancement, and some with the final touch upon them, might be found
+in Kenyon's studio.
+
+Here might be witnessed the process of actually chiselling the marble,
+with which (as it is not quite satisfactory to think) a sculptor in
+these days has very little to do. In Italy, there is a class of men
+whose merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was
+possessed by the ancient artificers, who wrought out the designs of
+Praxiteles; or, very possibly, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of
+illusive representation can be effected in marble, they are capable of
+achieving, if the object be before their eyes. The sculptor has but to
+present these men with a plaster-cast of his design, and a sufficient
+block of marble, and tell them that the figure is imbedded in the stone,
+and must be freed from its encumbering superfluities; and, in due time,
+without the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger,
+he will see before him the statue that is to make him renowned. His
+creative power has wrought it with a word.
+
+In no other art, surely, does genius find such effective instruments,
+and so happily relieve itself of the drudgery, of actual performance;
+doing wonderfully nice things by the hands of other people, when it may
+be suspected they could not always be done by the sculptor's own. And
+how much of the admiration which our artists get for their buttons
+and buttonholes, their shoe-ties, their neckcloths,--and these, at our
+present epoch of taste, make a large share of the renown,--would be
+abated, if we were generally aware that the sculptor can claim no credit
+for such pretty performances, as immortalized in marble! They are not
+his work, but that of some nameless machine in human shape.
+
+Miriam stopped an instant in an antechamber, to look at a half-finished
+bust, the features of which seemed to be struggling out of the stone;
+and, as it were, scattering and dissolving its hard substance by the
+glow of feeling and intelligence. As the skilful workman gave stroke
+after stroke of the chisel with apparent carelessness, but sure effect,
+it was impossible not to think that the outer marble was merely an
+extraneous environment; the human countenance within its embrace must
+have existed there since the limestone ledges of Carrara were first
+made. Another bust was nearly completed, though still one of Kenyon's
+most trustworthy assistants was at work, giving delicate touches,
+shaving off an impalpable something, and leaving little heaps of marble
+dust to attest it.
+
+"As these busts in the block of marble," thought Miriam, "so does our
+individual fate exist in the limestone of time. We fancy that we carve
+it out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action."
+
+Kenyon was in the inner room, but, hearing a step in the antechamber, he
+threw a veil over what he was at work upon, and came out to receive his
+visitor. He was dressed in a gray blouse, with a little cap on the top
+of his head; a costume which became him better than the formal garments
+which he wore whenever he passed out of his own domains. The sculptor
+had a face which, when time had done a little more for it, would offer a
+worthy subject for as good an artist as himself: features finely cut, as
+if already marble; an ideal forehead, deeply set eyes, and a mouth much
+hidden in a light-brown beard, but apparently sensitive and delicate.
+
+"I will not offer you my hand," said he; "it is grimy with Cleopatra's
+clay."
+
+"No; I will not touch clay; it is earthy and human," answered Miriam.
+"I have come to try whether there is any calm and coolness among
+your marbles. My own art is too nervous, too passionate, too full of
+agitation, for me to work at it whole days together, without intervals
+of repose. So, what have you to show me?"
+
+"Pray look at everything here," said Kenyon. "I love to have painters
+see my work. Their judgment is unprejudiced, and more valuable than that
+of the world generally, from the light which their own art throws on
+mine. More valuable, too, than that of my brother sculptors, who never
+judge me fairly,--nor I them, perhaps."
+
+To gratify him, Miriam looked round at the specimens in marble or
+plaster, of which there were several in the room, comprising originals
+or casts of most of the designs that Kenyon had thus far produced. He
+was still too young to have accumulated a large gallery of such things.
+What he had to show were chiefly the attempts and experiments, in
+various directions, of a beginner in art, acting as a stern tutor to
+himself, and profiting more by his failures than by any successes of
+which he was yet capable. Some of them, however, had great merit; and
+in the pure, fine glow of the new marble, it may be, they dazzled the
+judgment into awarding them higher praise than they deserved. Miriam
+admired the statue of a beautiful youth, a pearlfisher; who had got
+entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the
+pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the seaweeds, all of like value to
+him now.
+
+"The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,"
+remarked she. "But what a strange efficacy there is in death! If we
+cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as
+well. I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral
+lesson; and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient
+repose."
+
+In another style, there was a grand, calm head of Milton, not copied
+from any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them,
+because all known representations of the poet had been profoundly
+studied, and solved in the artist's mind. The bust over the tomb in
+Grey Friars Church, the original miniatures and pictures, wherever to
+be found, had mingled each its special truth in this one work; wherein,
+likewise, by long perusal and deep love of the Paradise Lost, the Comus,
+the Lycidas, and L'Allegro, the sculptor had succeeded, even better than
+he knew, in spiritualizing his marble with the poet's mighty genius. And
+this was a great thing to have achieved, such a length of time after the
+dry bones and dust of Milton were like those of any other dead man.
+
+There were also several portrait-busts, comprising those of two or three
+of the illustrious men of our own country, whom Kenyon, before he left
+America, had asked permission to model. He had done so, because he
+sincerely believed that, whether he wrought the busts in marble or
+bronze, the one would corrode and the other crumble in the long lapse
+of time, beneath these great men's immortality. Possibly, however, the
+young artist may have underestimated the durability of his material.
+Other faces there were, too, of men who (if the brevity of their
+remembrance, after death, can be augured from their little value in
+life) should have been represented in snow rather than marble. Posterity
+will be puzzled what to do with busts like these, the concretions and
+petrifactions of a vain self-estimate; but will find, no doubt, that they
+serve to build into stone walls, or burn into quicklime, as well as if
+the marble had never been blocked into the guise of human heads.
+
+But it is an awful thing, indeed, this endless endurance, this almost
+indestructibility, of a marble bust! Whether in our own case, or that of
+other men, it bids us sadly measure the little, little time during which
+our lineaments are likely to be of interest to any human being. It
+is especially singular that Americans should care about perpetuating
+themselves in this mode. The brief duration of our families, as
+a hereditary household, renders it next to a certainty that the
+great-grandchildren will not know their father's grandfather, and that
+half a century hence at furthest, the hammer of the auctioneer will
+thump its knock-down blow against his blockhead, sold at so much for the
+pound of stone! And it ought to make us shiver, the idea of leaving
+our features to be a dusty-white ghost among strangers of another
+generation, who will take our nose between their thumb and fingers (as
+we have seen men do by Caesar's), and infallibly break it off if they
+can do so without detection!
+
+"Yes," said Miriam, who had been revolving some such thoughts as the
+above, "it is a good state of mind for mortal man, when he is content to
+leave no more definite memorial than the grass, which will sprout kindly
+and speedily over his grave, if we do not make the spot barren with
+marble. Methinks, too, it will be a fresher and better world, when it
+flings off this great burden of stony memories, which the ages have
+deemed it a piety to heap upon its back."
+
+"What you say," remarked Kenyon, "goes against my whole art. Sculpture,
+and the delight which men naturally take in it, appear to me a proof
+that it is good to work with all time before our view."
+
+"Well, well," answered Miriam, "I must not quarrel with you for flinging
+your heavy stones at poor Posterity; and, to say the truth, I think you
+are as likely to hit the mark as anybody. These busts, now, much as I
+seem to scorn them, make me feel as if you were a magician.. You turn
+feverish men into cool, quiet marble. What a blessed change for them!
+Would you could do as much for me!"
+
+"O, gladly!" cried Kenyon, who had long wished to model that beautiful
+and most expressive face. "When will you begin to sit?"
+
+"Poh! that was not what I meant," said Miriam. "Come, show me something
+else."
+
+"Do you recognize this?" asked the sculptor.
+
+He took out of his desk a little old-fashioned ivory coffer, yellow
+with age; it was richly carved with antique figures and foliage; and had
+Kenyon thought fit to say that Benvenuto Cellini wrought this precious
+box, the skill and elaborate fancy of the work would by no means have
+discredited his word, nor the old artist's fame. At least, it was
+evidently a production of Benvenuto's school and century, and might
+once have been the jewel-case of some grand lady at the court of the De'
+Medici.
+
+Lifting the lid, however, no blaze of diamonds was disclosed, but
+only, lapped in fleecy cotton, a small, beautifully shaped hand, most
+delicately sculptured in marble. Such loving care and nicest art had
+been lavished here, that the palm really seemed to have a tenderness
+in its very substance. Touching those lovely fingers,--had the jealous
+sculptor allowed you to touch,--you could hardly believe that a virgin
+warmth would not steal from them into your heart.
+
+"Ah, this is very beautiful!" exclaimed Miriam, with a genial smile.
+"It is as good in its way as Loulie's hand with its baby-dimples, which
+Powers showed me at Florence, evidently valuing it as much as if he
+had wrought it out of a piece of his great heart. As good as Harriet
+Hosmer's clasped hands of Browning and his wife, symbolizing the
+individuality and heroic union of two high, poetic lives! Nay, I do not
+question that it is better than either of those, because you must
+have wrought it passionately, in spite of its maiden palm and dainty
+fingertips."
+
+"Then you do recognize it?" asked Kenyon.
+
+"There is but one right hand on earth that could have supplied
+the model," answered Miriam; "so small and slender, so perfectly
+symmetrical, and yet with a character of delicate energy. I have watched
+it a hundred times at its work; but I did not dream that you had won
+Hilda so far! How have you persuaded that shy maiden to let you take her
+hand in marble?"
+
+"Never! She never knew it!" hastily replied Kenyon, anxious to vindicate
+his mistress's maidenly reserve. "I stole it from her. The hand is a
+reminiscence. After gazing at it so often, and even holding it once for
+an instant, when Hilda was not thinking of me, I should be a bungler
+indeed, if I could not now reproduce it to something like the life."
+
+"May you win the original one day!" said Miriam kindly.
+
+"I have little ground to hope it," answered the sculptor despondingly;
+"Hilda does not dwell in our mortal atmosphere; and gentle and soft as
+she appears, it will be as difficult to win her heart as to entice down
+a white bird from its sunny freedom in the sky. It is strange, with all
+her delicacy and fragility, the impression she makes of being utterly
+sufficient to herself. No; I shall never win her. She is abundantly
+capable of sympathy, and delights to receive it, but she has no need of
+love."
+
+"I partly agree with you," said Miriam. "It is a mistaken idea, which
+men generally entertain, that nature has made women especially prone to
+throw their whole being into what is technically called love. We have,
+to say the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have
+nothing else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects
+in life, they are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women
+distinguished in art, literature, and science,--and multitudes whose
+hearts and minds find good employment in less ostentatious ways,--who
+lead high, lonely lives, and are conscious of no sacrifice so far as
+your sex is concerned."
+
+"And Hilda will be one of these!" said Kenyon sadly; "the thought makes
+me shiver for myself, and and for her, too."
+
+"Well," said Miriam, smiling, "perhaps she may sprain the delicate wrist
+which you have sculptured to such perfection. In that case you may hope.
+These old masters to whom she has vowed herself, and whom her slender
+hand and woman's heart serve so faithfully, are your only rivals."
+
+The sculptor sighed as he put away the treasure of Hilda's marble hand
+into the ivory coffer, and thought how slight was the possibility
+that he should ever feel responsive to his own the tender clasp of the
+original. He dared not even kiss the image that he himself had made: it
+had assumed its share of Hilda's remote and shy divinity.
+
+"And now," said Miriam, "show me the new statue which you asked me
+hither to see."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+CLEOPATRA
+
+
+"My new statue!" said Kenyon, who had positively forgotten it in the
+thought of Hilda; "here it is, under this veil." "Not a nude figure,
+I hope," observed Miriam. "Every young sculptor seems to think that he
+must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it
+Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of
+decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such
+things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and
+there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist,
+therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a
+pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses
+at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such
+circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the
+open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude
+statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped
+in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I
+believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really
+do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be
+glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead."
+
+"You are severe upon the professors of my art," said Kenyon, half
+smiling, half seriously; "not that you are wholly wrong, either. We are
+bound to accept drapery of some kind, and make the best of it. But
+what are we to do? Must we adopt the costume of to-day, and carve, for
+example, a Venus in a hoop-petticoat?"
+
+"That would be a boulder, indeed!" rejoined Miriam, laughing. "But
+the difficulty goes to confirm me in my belief that, except for
+portrait-busts, sculpture has no longer a right to claim any place among
+living arts. It has wrought itself out, and come fairly to an end. There
+is never a new group nowadays; never even so much as a new attitude.
+Greenough (I take my examples among men of merit) imagined nothing new;
+nor Crawford either, except in the tailoring line. There are not, as you
+will own, more than half a dozen positively original statues or groups
+in the world, and these few are of immemorial antiquity. A person
+familiar with the Vatican, the Uffizzi Gallery, the Naples Gallery,
+and the Louvre, will at once refer any modern production to its antique
+prototype; which, moreover, had begun to get out of fashion, even in old
+Roman days."
+
+"Pray stop, Miriam," cried Kenyon, "or I shall fling away the chisel
+forever!"
+
+"Fairly own to me, then, my friend," rejoined Miriam, whose disturbed
+mind found a certain relief in this declamation, "that you sculptors
+are, of necessity, the greatest plagiarists in the world."
+
+"I do not own it," said Kenyon, "yet cannot utterly contradict you, as
+regards the actual state of the art. But as long as the Carrara quarries
+still yield pure blocks, and while my own country has marble mountains,
+probably as fine in quality, I shall steadfastly believe that future
+sculptors will revive this noblest of the beautiful arts, and people the
+world with new shapes of delicate grace and massive grandeur. Perhaps,"
+he added, smiling, "mankind will consent to wear a more manageable
+costume; or, at worst, we sculptors shall get the skill to make
+broadcloth transparent, and render a majestic human character visible
+through the coats and trousers of the present day."
+
+"Be it so!" said Miriam; "you are past my counsel. Show me the veiled
+figure, which, I am afraid, I have criticised beforehand. To make
+amends, I am in the mood to praise it now."
+
+But, as Kenyon was about to take the cloth off the clay model, she laid
+her hand on his arm.
+
+"Tell me first what is the subject," said she, "for I have sometimes
+incurred great displeasure from members of your brotherhood by being
+too obtuse to puzzle out the purport of their productions. It is so
+difficult, you know, to compress and define a character or story,
+and make it patent at a glance, within the narrow scope attainable
+by sculpture! Indeed, I fancy it is still the ordinary habit with
+sculptors, first to finish their group of statuary,--in such development
+as the particular block of marble will allow,--and then to choose the
+subject; as John of Bologna did with his Rape of the Sabines. Have you
+followed that good example?"
+
+"No; my statue is intended for Cleopatra," replied Kenyon, a little
+disturbed by Miriam's raillery. "The special epoch of her history you
+must make out for yourself."
+
+He drew away the cloth that had served to keep the moisture of the clay
+model from being exhaled. The sitting figure of a woman was seen. She
+was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously
+studied from that of ancient Egypt, as revealed by the strange sculpture
+of that country, its coins, drawings, painted mummy-cases, and whatever
+other tokens have been dug out of its pyramids, graves, and catacombs.
+Even the stiff Egyptian head-dress was adhered to, but had been softened
+into a rich feminine adornment, without losing a particle of its
+truth. Difficulties that might well have seemed insurmountable had been
+courageously encountered and made flexible to purposes of grace and
+dignity; so that Cleopatra sat attired in a garb proper to her historic
+and queenly state, as a daughter of the Ptolemies, and yet such as
+the beautiful woman would have put on as best adapted to heighten the
+magnificence of her charms, and kindle a tropic fire in the cold eyes of
+Octavius.
+
+A marvellous repose--that rare merit in statuary, except it be the
+lumpish repose native to the block of stone--was diffused throughout the
+figure. The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever
+and turmoil of her life, and for one instant--as it were, between two
+pulse throbs--had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout
+every vein and muscle. It was the repose of despair, indeed; for
+Octavius had seen her, and remained insensible to her enchantments. But
+still there was a great smouldering furnace deep down in the woman's
+heart. The repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to
+stir hand or foot again; and yet, such was the creature's latent energy
+and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the
+very breath that you were now drawing midway in your throat.
+
+The face was a miraculous success. The sculptor had not shunned to
+give the full Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the Egyptian
+physiognomy. His courage and integrity had been abundantly rewarded; for
+Cleopatra's beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond
+comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen
+the tame Grecian type. The expression was of profound, gloomy, heavily
+revolving thought; a glance into her past life and present emergencies,
+while her spirit gathered itself up for some new struggle, or was
+getting sternly reconciled to impending doom. In one view, there was a
+certain softness and tenderness,--how breathed into the statue, among so
+many strong and passionate elements, it is impossible to say. Catching
+another glimpse, you beheld her as implacable as a stone and cruel as
+fire.
+
+In a word, all Cleopatra--fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender,
+wicked, terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment--was
+kneaded into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet
+clay from the Tiber. Soon, apotheosized in an indestructible material,
+she would be one of the images that men keep forever, finding a heat in
+them which does not cool down, throughout the centuries?
+
+"What a woman is this!" exclaimed Miriam, after a long pause. "Tell me,
+did she ever try, even while you were creating her, to overcome you with
+her fury or her love? Were you not afraid to touch her, as she grew more
+and more towards hot life beneath your hand? My dear friend, it is a
+great work! How have you learned to do it?"
+
+"It is the concretion of a good deal of thought, emotion, and toil of
+brain and hand," said Kenyon, not without a perception that his work was
+good; "but I know not how it came about at last. I kindled a great fire
+within my mind, and threw in the material,--as Aaron threw the gold
+of the Israelites into the furnace,--and in the midmost heat uprose
+Cleopatra, as you see her."
+
+"What I most marvel at," said Miriam, "is the womanhood that you have so
+thoroughly mixed up with all those seemingly discordant elements. Where
+did you get that secret? You never found it in your gentle Hilda, yet I
+recognize its truth."
+
+"No, surely, it was not in Hilda," said Kenyon. "Her womanhood is of the
+ethereal type, and incompatible with any shadow of darkness or evil."
+
+"You are right," rejoined Miriam; "there are women of that ethereal
+type, as you term it, and Hilda is one of them. She would die of her
+first wrong-doing,--supposing for a moment that she could be capable of
+doing wrong. Of sorrow, slender as she seems, Hilda might bear a great
+burden; of sin, not a feather's weight. Methinks now, were it my doom, I
+could bear either, or both at once; but my conscience is still as white
+as Hilda's. Do you question it?"
+
+"Heaven forbid, Miriam!" exclaimed the sculptor.
+
+He was startled at the strange turn which she had so suddenly given to
+the conversation. Her voice, too,--so much emotion was stifled rather
+than expressed in it, sounded unnatural.
+
+"O, my friend," cried she, with sudden passion, "will you be my friend
+indeed? I am lonely, lonely, lonely! There is a secret in my heart that
+burns me,--that tortures me! Sometimes I fear to go mad of it; sometimes
+I hope to die of it; but neither of the two happens. Ah, if I could but
+whisper it to only one human soul! And you--you see far into womanhood;
+you receive it widely into your large view. Perhaps--perhaps, but Heaven
+only knows, you might understand me! O, let me speak!"
+
+"Miriam, dear friend," replied the sculptor, "if I can help you, speak
+freely, as to a brother."
+
+"Help me? No!" said Miriam.
+
+Kenyon's response had been perfectly frank and kind; and yet the
+subtlety of Miriam's emotion detected a certain reserve and alarm in his
+warmly expressed readiness to hear her story. In his secret soul, to
+say the truth, the sculptor doubted whether it were well for this
+poor, suffering girl to speak what she so yearned to say, or for him
+to listen. If there were any active duty of friendship to be performed,
+then, indeed, he would joyfully have come forward to do his best. But if
+it were only a pent-up heart that sought an outlet? in that case it was
+by no means so certain that a confession would do good. The more her
+secret struggled and fought to be told, the more certain would it be to
+change all former relations that had subsisted between herself and the
+friend to whom she might reveal it. Unless he could give her all the
+sympathy, and just the kind of sympathy that the occasion required,
+Miriam would hate him by and by, and herself still more, if he let her
+speak.
+
+This was what Kenyon said to himself; but his reluctance, after all, and
+whether he were conscious of it or no, resulted from a suspicion that
+had crept into his heart and lay there in a dark corner. Obscure as it
+was, when Miriam looked into his eyes, she detected it at once.
+
+"Ah, I shall hate you!" cried she, echoing the thought which he had
+not spoken; she was half choked with the gush of passion that was thus
+turned back upon her. "You are as cold and pitiless as your own marble."
+
+"No; but full of sympathy, God knows!" replied he.
+
+In truth, his suspicions, however warranted by the mystery in which
+Miriam was enveloped, had vanished in the earnestness of his kindly and
+sorrowful emotion. He was now ready to receive her trust.
+
+"Keep your sympathy, then, for sorrows that admit of such solace," said
+she, making a strong effort to compose herself. "As for my griefs, I
+know how to manage them. It was all a mistake: you can do nothing for
+me, unless you petrify me into a marble companion for your Cleopatra
+there; and I am not of her sisterhood, I do assure you. Forget this
+foolish scene, my friend, and never let me see a reference to it in your
+eyes when they meet mine hereafter."
+
+"Since you desire it, all shall be forgotten," answered the sculptor,
+pressing her hand as she departed; "or, if ever I can serve you, let my
+readiness to do so be remembered. Meanwhile, dear Miriam, let us meet in
+the same clear, friendly light as heretofore."
+
+"You are less sincere than I thought you," said Miriam, "if you try to
+make me think that there will be no change."
+
+As he attended her through the antechamber, she pointed to the statue of
+the pearl-diver.
+
+"My secret is not a pearl," said she; "yet a man might drown himself in
+plunging after it."
+
+After Kenyon had closed the door, she went wearily down the staircase,
+but paused midway, as if debating with herself whether to return.
+
+"The mischief was done," thought she; "and I might as well have had the
+solace that ought to come with it. I have lost,--by staggering a little
+way beyond the mark, in the blindness of my distress, I have lost, as
+we shall hereafter find, the genuine friendship of this clear-minded,
+honorable, true-hearted young man, and all for nothing. What if I should
+go back this moment and compel him to listen?"
+
+She ascended two or three of the stairs, but again paused, murmured to
+herself, and shook her head.
+
+"No, no, no," she thought; "and I wonder how I ever came to dream of
+it. Unless I had his heart for my own,--and that is Hilda's, nor would I
+steal it from her,--it should never be the treasure Place of my secret.
+It is no precious pearl, as I just now told him; but my dark-red
+carbuncle--red as blood--is too rich a gem to put into a stranger's
+casket."
+
+She went down the stairs, and found her shadow waiting for her in the
+street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
+
+
+On the evening after Miriam's visit to Kenyon's studio, there was an
+assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of
+American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren; and some
+few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was
+past. Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with
+them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from fits natural bent
+that, like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he
+could gain admittance.
+
+The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy
+apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body. It was no more
+formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among
+the foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people--or disagreeable
+ones, as the case may be--encounter one another with little ceremony.
+
+If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who
+cannot find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and
+pursuits all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world's
+stock of beautiful productions.
+
+One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of
+artists--their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so
+loath to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air--is,
+doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous
+enough to create a congenial atmosphere. In every other clime they are
+isolated strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.
+
+Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large
+stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the
+pencil. On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the
+jealousies and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung
+aside, still irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of
+imaginative men. It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should
+be the fact. The public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor's or the
+painter's prospects of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to
+which literary men make their appeal. It is composed of a very limited
+body of wealthy patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but
+blind judges in matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception.
+Thus, success in art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and
+it is almost inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at
+his gifted brother's fame, and be chary of the good word that might help
+him to sell still another statue or picture. You seldom hear a painter
+heap generous praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor
+never has a favorable eye for any marble but his own.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are
+conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity.
+They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the
+unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such
+brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from
+galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality
+dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.
+
+The company this evening included several men and women whom the world
+has heard of, and many others, beyond all question, whom it ought to
+know. It would be a pleasure to introduce them upon our humble pages,
+name by name, and had we confidence enough in our own taste--to crown
+each well-deserving brow according to its deserts. The opportunity
+is tempting, but not easily manageable, and far too perilous, both in
+respect to those individuals whom we might bring forward, and the far
+greater number that must needs be left in the shade. Ink, moreover, is
+apt to have a corrosive quality, and might chance to raise a blister,
+instead of any more agreeable titillation, on skins so sensitive as
+those of artists. We must therefore forego the delight of illuminating
+this chapter with personal allusions to men whose renown glows richly on
+canvas, or gleams in the white moonlight of marble.
+
+Otherwise we might point to an artist who has studied Nature with
+such tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him to
+reproduce her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth,
+and yet are but the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the
+painter's insight and interpreted for us by his skill. By his magic,
+the moon throws her light far out of the picture, and the crimson of
+the summer night absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face. Or we might
+indicate a poet-painter, whose song has the vividness of picture, and
+whose canvas is peopled with angels, fairies, and water sprites, done to
+the ethereal life, because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood.
+Or we might bow before an artist, who has wrought too sincerely, too
+religiously, with too earnest a feeling, and too delicate a touch, for
+the world at once to recognize how much toil and thought are compressed
+into the stately brow of Prospero, and Miranda's maiden loveliness; or
+from what a depth within this painter's heart the Angel is leading forth
+St. Peter.
+
+Thus it would be easy to go on, perpetrating a score of little
+epigrammatical allusions, like the above, all kindly meant, but none
+of them quite hitting the mark, and often striking where they were not
+aimed. It may be allowable to say, however, that American art is much
+better represented at Rome in the pictorial than in the sculpturesque
+department. Yet the men of marble appear to have more weight with the
+public than the men of canvas; perhaps on account of the greater density
+and solid substance of the material in which they work, and the sort
+of physical advantage which their labors thus acquire over the illusive
+unreality of color. To be a sculptor seems a distinction in itself;
+whereas a painter is nothing, unless individually eminent.
+
+One sculptor there was, an Englishman, endowed with a beautiful fancy,
+and possessing at his fingers' ends the capability of doing beautiful
+things. He was a quiet, simple, elderly personage, with eyes brown and
+bright, under a slightly impending brow, and a Grecian profile, such as
+he might have cut with his own chisel. He had spent his life, for forty
+years, in making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other
+marble progeny of dreamwork, or rather frostwork: it was all a vapory
+exhalation out of the Grecian mythology, crystallizing on the dull
+window-panes of to-day. Gifted with a more delicate power than any other
+man alive, he had foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted
+himself into a Pagan idealist, whose business or efficacy, in our
+present world, it would be exceedingly difficult to define. And, loving
+and reverencing the pure material in which he wrought, as surely this
+admirable sculptor did, he had nevertheless robbed the marble of its
+chastity, by giving it an artificial warmth of hue. Thus it became a sin
+and shame to look at his nude goddesses. They had revealed themselves
+to his imagination, no doubt, with all their deity about them; but,
+bedaubed with buff color, they stood forth to the eyes of the profane in
+the guise of naked women. But, whatever criticism may be ventured on
+his style, it was good to meet a man so modest and yet imbued with such
+thorough and simple conviction of his own right principles and practice,
+and so quietly satisfied that his kind of antique achievement was all
+that sculpture could effect for modern life.
+
+
+This eminent person's weight and authority among his artistic brethren
+were very evident; for beginning unobtrusively to utter himself on
+a topic of art, he was soon the centre of a little crowd of younger
+sculptors. They drank in his wisdom, as if it would serve all the
+purposes of original inspiration; he, meanwhile, discoursing with
+gentle calmness, as if there could possibly be no other side, and often
+ratifying, as it were, his own conclusions by a mildly emphatic "Yes."
+
+The veteran Sculptor's unsought audience was composed mostly of our own
+countrymen. It is fair to say, that they were a body of very dexterous
+and capable artists, each of whom had probably given the delighted
+public a nude statue, or had won credit for even higher skill by the
+nice carving of buttonholes, shoe-ties, coat-seams, shirt-bosoms, and
+other such graceful peculiarities of modern costume. Smart, practical
+men they doubtless were, and some of them far more than this, but still
+not precisely what an uninitiated person looks for in a sculptor. A
+sculptor, indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon
+him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in
+measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves
+him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white,
+undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in
+it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea
+to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for
+its faithful care, its incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an
+ethereal life. Under this aspect, marble assumes a sacred character; and
+no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain
+consecration and a priesthood, the only evidence of which, for the
+public eye, will be the high treatment of heroic subjects, or the
+delicate evolution of spiritual, through material beauty.
+
+No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by them
+probably, troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever
+sculptors. Marble, in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute
+to it. It was merely a sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into
+convenient blocks, and worth, in that state, about two or three dollars
+per pound; and it was susceptible of being wrought into certain shapes
+(by their own mechanical ingenuity, or that of artisans in their
+employment) which would enable them to sell it again at a much higher
+figure. Such men, on the strength of some small knack in handling clay,
+which might have been fitly employed in making wax-work, are bold to
+call themselves sculptors. How terrible should be the thought that the
+nude woman whom the modern artist patches together, bit by bit, from a
+dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing by her, shall last as long
+as the Venus of the Capitol!--that his group of--no matter what, since
+it has no moral or intellectual existence will not physically crumble
+any sooner than the immortal agony of the Laocoon!
+
+Yet we love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are
+not quite able to appreciate. Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or
+whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter
+people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet
+in ordinary society. They were not wholly confined within the sordid
+compass of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed
+faithfully out, would lead them to the beautiful, and always had a
+tendency thitherward, even if they lingered to gather up golden dross
+by the wayside. Their actual business (though they talked about it very
+much as other men talk of cotton, politics, flour barrels, and sugar)
+necessarily illuminated their conversation with something akin to the
+ideal. So, when the guests collected themselves in little groups, here
+and there, in the wide saloon, a cheerful and airy gossip began to be
+heard. The atmosphere ceased to be precisely that of common life; a
+hint, mellow tinge, such as we see in pictures, mingled itself with the
+lamplight.
+
+This good effect was assisted by many curious little treasures of
+art, which the host had taken care to strew upon his tables. They
+were principally such bits of antiquity as the soil of Rome and its
+neighborhood are still rich in; seals, gems, small figures of bronze,
+mediaeval carvings in ivory; things which had been obtained at little
+cost, yet might have borne no inconsiderable value in the museum of a
+virtuoso.
+
+As interesting as any of these relics was a large portfolio of old
+drawings, some of which, in the opinion of their possessor, bore
+evidence on their faces of the touch of master-hands. Very ragged and
+ill conditioned they mostly were, yellow with time, and tattered with
+rough usage; and, in their best estate, the designs had been scratched
+rudely with pen and ink, on coarse paper, or, if drawn with charcoal or
+a pencil, were now half rubbed out. You would not anywhere see rougher
+and homelier things than these. But this hasty rudeness made the
+sketches only the more valuable; because the artist seemed to have
+bestirred himself at the pinch of the moment, snatching up whatever
+material was nearest, so as to seize the first glimpse of an idea
+that might vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Thus, by the spell of
+a creased, soiled, and discolored scrap of paper, you were enabled to
+steal close to an old master, and watch him in the very effervescence of
+his genius.
+
+According to the judgment of several connoisseurs, Raphael's own
+hand had communicated its magnetism to one of these sketches; and, if
+genuine, it was evidently his first conception of a favorite Madonna,
+now hanging in the private apartment of the Grand Duke, at Florence.
+Another drawing was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and appeared to be
+a somewhat varied design for his picture of Modesty and Vanity, in the
+Sciarra Palace. There were at least half a dozen others, to which the
+owner assigned as high an origin. It was delightful to believe in their
+authenticity, at all events; for these things make the spectator more
+vividly sensible of a great painter's power, than the final glow
+and perfected art of the most consummate picture that may have been
+elaborated from them. There is an effluence of divinity in the first
+sketch; and there, if anywhere, you find the pure light of inspiration,
+which the subsequent toil of the artist serves to bring out in stronger
+lustre, indeed, but likewise adulterates it with what belongs to an
+inferior mood. The aroma and fragrance of new thoughts were perceptible
+in these designs, after three centuries of wear and tear. The charm lay
+partly in their very imperfection; for this is suggestive, and sets
+the imagination at work; whereas, the finished picture, if a good one,
+leaves the spectator nothing to do, and, if bad, confuses, stupefies,
+disenchants, and disheartens him.
+
+Hilda was greatly interested in this rich portfolio. She lingered so
+long over one particular sketch, that Miriam asked her what discovery
+she had made.
+
+"Look at it carefully," replied Hilda, putting the sketch into her
+hands. "If you take pains to disentangle the design from those
+pencil-marks that seem to have been scrawled over it, I think you will
+see something very curious."
+
+"It is a hopeless affair, I am afraid," said Miriam. "I have neither
+your faith, dear Hilda, nor your perceptive faculty. Fie! what a blurred
+scrawl it is indeed!"
+
+The drawing had originally been very slight, and had suffered more
+from time and hard usage than almost any other in the collection; it
+appeared, too, that there had been an attempt (perhaps by the very hand
+that drew it) to obliterate the design. By Hilda's help, however, Miriam
+pretty distinctly made out a winged figure with a drawn sword, and a
+dragon, or a demon, prostrate at his feet.
+
+"I am convinced," said Hilda in a low, reverential tone, "that Guido's
+own touches are on that ancient scrap of paper! If so, it must be his
+original sketch for the picture of the Archangel Michael setting his
+foot upon the demon, in the Church of the Cappuccini. The composition
+and general arrangement of the sketch are the same with those of the
+picture; the only difference being, that the demon has a more upturned
+face, and scowls vindictively at the Archangel, who turns away his eyes
+in painful disgust."
+
+"No wonder!" responded Miriam. "The expression suits the daintiness of
+Michael's character, as Guido represents him. He never could have looked
+the demon in the face!"
+
+"Miriam!" exclaimed her friend reproachfully, "you grieve me, and you
+know it, by pretending to speak contemptuously of the most beautiful and
+the divinest figure that mortal painter ever drew."
+
+"Forgive me, Hilda!" said Miriam. "You take these matters more
+religiously than I can, for my life. Guido's Archangel is a fine
+picture, of course, but it never impressed me as it does _you_."
+
+"Well; we will not talk of that," answered Hilda. "What I wanted you to
+notice, in this sketch, is the face of the demon. It is entirely unlike
+the demon of the finished picture. Guido, you know, always affirmed that
+the resemblance to Cardinal Pamfili was either casual or imaginary. Now,
+here is the face as he first conceived it."
+
+"And a more energetic demon, altogether, than that of the finished
+picture," said Kenyon, taking the sketch into his hand. "What a spirit
+is conveyed into the ugliness of this strong, writhing, squirming
+dragon, under the Archangel's foot! Neither is the face an impossible
+one. Upon my word, I have seen it somewhere, and on the shoulders of a
+living man!"
+
+"And so have I," said Hilda. "It was what struck me from the first."
+
+"Donatello, look at this face!" cried Kenyon.
+
+The young Italian, as may be supposed, took little interest in matters
+of art, and seldom or never ventured an opinion respecting them. After
+holding the sketch a single instant in his hand, he flung it from him
+with a shudder of disgust and repugnance, and a frown that had all the
+bitterness of hatred.
+
+"I know the face well!" whispered he. "It is Miriam's model!"
+
+It was acknowledged both by Kenyon and Hilda that they had detected, or
+fancied, the resemblance which Donatello so strongly affirmed; and it
+added not a little to the grotesque and weird character which, half
+playfully, half seriously, they assigned to Miriam's attendant, to think
+of him as personating the demon's part in a picture of more than two
+centuries ago. Had Guido, in his effort to imagine the utmost of sin
+and misery, which his pencil could represent, hit ideally upon just this
+face? Or was it an actual portrait of somebody, that haunted the old
+master, as Miriam was haunted now? Did the ominous shadow follow him
+through all the sunshine of his earlier career, and into the gloom that
+gathered about its close? And when Guido died, did the spectre betake
+himself to those ancient sepulchres, there awaiting a new victim, till
+it was Miriam's ill-hap to encounter him?
+
+"I do not acknowledge the resemblance at all," said Miriam, looking
+narrowly at the sketch; "and, as I have drawn the face twenty times, I
+think you will own that I am the best judge."
+
+A discussion here arose, in reference to Guido's Archangel, and it was
+agreed that these four friends should visit the Church of the Cappuccini
+the next morning, and critically examine the picture in question;
+the similarity between it and the sketch being, at all events, a very
+curious circumstance.
+
+It was now a little past ten o'clock, when some of the company, who had
+been standing in a balcony, declared the moonlight to be resplendent.
+They proposed a ramble through the streets, taking in their way some
+of those scenes of ruin which produced their best effects under the
+splendor of the Italian moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
+
+
+The proposal for a moonlight ramble was received with acclamation by
+all the younger portion of the company. They immediately set forth and
+descended from story to story, dimly lighting their way by waxen tapers,
+which are a necessary equipment to those whose thoroughfare, in the
+night-time, lies up and down a Roman staircase. Emerging from the
+courtyard of the edifice, they looked upward and saw the sky full of
+light, which seemed to have a delicate purple or crimson lustre, or, at
+least some richer tinge than the cold, white moonshine of other
+skies. It gleamed over the front of the opposite palace, showing the
+architectural ornaments of its cornice and pillared portal, as well as
+the iron-barred basement windows, that gave such a prison-like aspect to
+the structure, and the shabbiness and Squalor that lay along its base.
+A cobbler was just shutting up his little shop, in the basement of the
+palace; a cigar vender's lantern flared in the blast that came through
+the archway; a French sentinel paced to and fro before the portal; a
+homeless dog, that haunted thereabouts, barked as obstreperously at the
+party as if he were the domestic guardian of the precincts.
+
+The air was quietly full of the noise of falling water, the cause
+of which was nowhere visible, though apparently near at hand. This
+pleasant, natural sound, not unlike that of a distant cascade in the
+forest, may be heard in many of the Roman streets and piazzas, when
+the tumult of the city is hushed; for consuls, emperors, and popes, the
+great men of every age, have found no better way of immortalizing their
+memories than by the shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging,
+upgush and downfall of water. They have written their names in that
+unstable element, and proved it a more durable record than brass or
+marble.
+
+"Donatello, you had better take one of those gay, boyish artists for
+your companion," said Miriam, when she found the Italian youth at
+her side. "I am not now in a merry mood, as when we set all the world
+a-dancing the other afternoon, in the Borghese grounds."
+
+"I never wish to dance any more," answered Donatello.
+
+"What a melancholy was in that tone!" exclaimed Miriam. "You are getting
+spoilt in this dreary Rome, and will be as wise and as wretched as all
+the rest of mankind, unless you go back soon to your Tuscan vineyards.
+Well; give me your arm, then! But take care that no friskiness comes
+over you. We must walk evenly and heavily to-night!"
+
+The party arranged itself according to its natural affinities or casual
+likings; a sculptor generally choosing a painter, and a painter a
+sculp--tor, for his companion, in preference to brethren of their own
+art. Kenyon would gladly have taken Hilda to himself, and have drawn
+her a little aside from the throng of merry wayfarers. But she kept near
+Miriam, and seemed, in her gentle and quiet way, to decline a separate
+alliance either with him or any other of her acquaintances.
+
+So they set forth, and had gone but a little way, when the narrow street
+emerged into a piazza, on one side of which, glistening and dimpling in
+the moonlight, was the most famous fountain in Rome. Its murmur--not
+to say its uproar--had been in the ears of the company, ever since they
+came into the open air. It was the Fountain of Trevi, which draws its
+precious water from a source far beyond the walls, whence it flows
+hitherward through old subterranean aqueducts, and sparkles forth as
+pure as the virgin who first led Agrippa to its well-spring, by her
+father's door.
+
+"I shall sip as much of this water as the hollow of my hand will hold,"
+said Miriam.
+
+"I am leaving Rome in a few days; and the tradition goes, that a
+parting draught at the Fountain of Trevi insures the traveller's return,
+whatever obstacles and improbabilities may seem to beset him. Will you
+drink, Donatello?"
+
+"Signorina, what you drink, I drink," said the youth.
+
+They and the rest of the party descended some steps to the water's
+brim, and, after a sip or two, stood gazing at the absurd design of the
+fountain, where some sculptor of Bernini's school had gone absolutely
+mad in marble. It was a great palace front, with niches and many
+bas-reliefs, out of which looked Agrippa's legendary virgin, and several
+of the allegoric sisterhood; while, at the base, appeared Neptune, with
+his floundering steeds, and Tritons blowing their horns about him, and
+twenty other artificial fantasies, which the calm moonlight soothed into
+better taste than was native to them.
+
+And, after all, it was as magnificent a piece of work as ever human
+skill contrived. At the foot of the palatial facade was strewn, with
+careful art and ordered irregularity, a broad and broken heap of massive
+rock, looking is if it might have lain there since the deluge. Over a
+central precipice fell the water, in a semicircular cascade; and from
+a hundred crevices, on all sides, snowy jets gushed up, and streams
+spouted out of the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in
+glistening drops; while other rivulets, that had run wild, came leaping
+from one rude step to another, over stones that were mossy, slimy, and
+green with sedge, because, in a Century of their wild play, Nature had
+adopted the Fountain of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for her
+own. Finally, the water, tumbling, sparkling, and dashing, with
+joyous haste and never-ceasing murmur, poured itself into a great
+marble-brimmed reservoir, and filled it with a quivering tide; on which
+was seen, continually, a snowy semicircle of momentary foam from the
+principal cascade, as well as a multitude of snow points from smaller
+jets. The basin occupied the whole breadth of the piazza, whence flights
+of steps descended to its border. A boat might float, and make voyages
+from one shore to another in this mimic lake.
+
+
+In the daytime, there is hardly a livelier scene in Rome than the
+neighborhood of the Fountain of Trevi; for the piazza is then filled
+with the stalls of vegetable and fruit dealers, chestnut roasters,
+cigar venders, and other people, whose petty and wandering traffic
+is transacted in the open air. It is likewise thronged with idlers,
+lounging over the iron railing, and with Forestieri, who came hither to
+see the famous fountain. Here, also, are seen men with buckets, urchins
+with cans, and maidens (a picture as old as the patriarchal times)
+bearing their pitchers upon their heads. For the water of Trevi is in
+request, far and wide, as the most refreshing draught for feverish lips,
+the pleasantest to mingle with wine, and the wholesomest to drink,
+in its native purity, that can anywhere be found. But now, at early
+midnight, the piazza was a solitude; and it was a delight to behold this
+untamable water, sporting by itself in the moonshine, and compelling
+all the elaborate trivialities of art to assume a natural aspect, in
+accordance with its own powerful simplicity.
+
+"What would be done with this water power," suggested an artist, "if we
+had it in one of our American cities? Would they employ it to turn the
+machinery of a cotton mill, I wonder?"
+
+"The good people would pull down those rampant marble deities," said
+Kenyon, "and, possibly, they would give me a commission to carve the
+one-and-thirty (is that the number?) sister States, each pouring a
+silver stream from a separate can into one vast basin, which should
+represent the grand reservoir of national prosperity."
+
+"Or, if they wanted a bit of satire," remarked an English artist, "you
+could set those same one-and-thirty States to cleansing the national
+flag of any stains that it may have incurred. The Roman washerwomen at
+the lavatory yonder, plying their labor in the open air, would serve
+admirably as models."
+
+"I have often intended to visit this fountain by moonlight,", said
+Miriam, "because it was here that the interview took place between
+Corinne and Lord Neville, after their separation and temporary
+estrangement. Pray come behind me, one of you, and let me try whether
+the face can be recognized in the water."
+
+Leaning over the stone brim of the basin, she heard footsteps stealing
+behind her, and knew that somebody was looking over her shoulder. The
+moonshine fell directly behind Miriam, illuminating the palace front and
+the whole scene of statues and rocks, and filling the basin, as it were,
+with tremulous and palpable light. Corinne, it will be remembered, knew
+Lord Neville by the reflection of his face in the water. In Miriam's
+case, however (owing to the agitation of the water, its transparency,
+and the angle at which she was compelled to lean over), no reflected
+image appeared; nor, from the same causes, would it have been possible
+for the recognition between Corinne and her lover to take place. The
+moon, indeed, flung Miriam's shadow at the bottom of the basin, as well
+as two more shadows of persons who had followed her, on either side.
+
+"Three shadows!" exclaimed Miriam--"three separate shadows, all so black
+and heavy that they sink in the water! There they lie on the bottom,
+as if all three were drowned together. This shadow on my right is
+Donatello; I know him by his curls, and the turn of his head. My
+left-hand companion puzzles me; a shapeless mass, as indistinct as the
+premonition of calamity! Which of you can it be? Ah!"
+
+She had turned round, while speaking, and saw beside her the strange
+creature whose attendance on her was already familiar, as a marvel and
+a jest; to the whole company of artists. A general burst of laughter
+followed the recognition; while the model leaned towards Miriam, as she
+shrank from him, and muttered something that was inaudible to those who
+witnessed the scene. By his gestures, however, they concluded that he
+was inviting her to bathe her hands.
+
+"He cannot be an Italian; at least not a Roman," observed an artist. "I
+never knew one of them to care about ablution. See him now! It is as
+if he were trying to wash off' the time-stains and earthly soil of a
+thousand years!"
+
+Dipping his hands into the capacious washbowl before him, the model
+rubbed them together with the utmost vehemence. Ever and anon, too,
+he peeped into the water, as if expecting to see the whole Fountain of
+Trevi turbid with the results of his ablution. Miriam looked at him,
+some little time, with an aspect of real terror, and even imitated him
+by leaning over to peep into the basin. Recovering herself, she took up
+some of the water in the hollow of her hand, and practised an old form
+of exorcism by flinging it in her persecutor's face.
+
+"In the name of all the Saints," cried she, "vanish, Demon, and let me
+be free of you now and forever!"
+
+"It will not suffice," said some of the mirthful party, "unless the
+Fountain of Trevi gushes with holy water."
+
+In fact, the exorcism was quite ineffectual upon the pertinacious demon,
+or whatever the apparition might be. Still he washed his brown, bony
+talons; still he peered into the vast basin, as if all the water of that
+great drinking-cup of Rome must needs be stained black or sanguine; and
+still he gesticulated to Miriam to follow his example. The spectators
+laughed loudly, but yet with a kind of constraint; for the creature's
+aspect was strangely repulsive and hideous.
+
+Miriam felt her arm seized violently by Donatello. She looked at him,
+and beheld a tigerlike fury gleaming from his wild eyes.
+
+"Bid me drown him!" whispered he, shuddering between rage and horrible
+disgust. "You shall hear his death gurgle in another instant!"
+
+"Peace, peace, Donatello!" said Miriam soothingly, for this naturally
+gentle and sportive being seemed all aflame with animal rage. "Do him no
+mischief! He is mad; and we are as mad as he, if we suffer ourselves to
+be disquieted by his antics. Let us leave him to bathe his hands till
+the fountain run dry, if he find solace and pastime in it. What is it to
+you or me, Donatello? There, there! Be quiet, foolish boy!"
+
+Her tone and gesture were such as she might have used in taming down the
+wrath of a faithful hound, that had taken upon himself to avenge some
+supposed affront to his mistress. She smoothed the young man's curls
+(for his fierce and sudden fury seemed to bristle among his hair), and
+touched his cheek with her soft palm, till his angry mood was a little
+assuaged.
+
+"Signorina, do I look as when you first knew me?" asked he, with a
+heavy, tremulous sigh, as they went onward, somewhat apart from their
+companions. "Methinks there has been a change upon me, these many
+months; and more and more, these last few days. The joy is gone out of
+my life; all gone! all gone! Feel my hand! Is it not very hot? Ah; and
+my heart burns hotter still!"
+
+"My poor Donatello, you are ill!" said Miriam, with deep sympathy and
+pity. "This melancholy and sickly Rome is stealing away the rich, joyous
+life that belongs to you. Go back, my dear friend, to your home among
+the hills, where (as I gather from what you have told me) your days were
+filled with simple and blameless delights. Have you found aught in the
+world that is worth' what you there enjoyed? Tell me truly, Donatello!"
+
+"Yes!" replied the young man.
+
+"And what, in Heaven's name?" asked she.
+
+"This burning pain in my heart," said Donatello; "for you are in the
+midst of it."
+
+By this time, they had left the Fountain of Trevi considerably behind
+them. Little further allusion was made to the scene at its margin; for
+the party regarded Miriam's persecutor as diseased in his wits, and were
+hardly to be surprised by any eccentricity in his deportment.
+
+Threading several narrow streets, they passed through the Piazza of the
+Holy Apostles, and soon came to Trajan's Forum. All over the surface
+of what once was Rome, it seems to be the effort of Time to bury up the
+ancient city, as if it were a corpse, and he the sexton; so that, in
+eighteen centuries, the soil over its grave has grown very deep, by the
+slow scattering of dust, and the accumulation of more modern decay upon
+older ruin.
+
+This was the fate, also, of Trajan's Forum, until some papal antiquary,
+a few hundred years ago, began to hollow it out again, and disclosed the
+full height of the gigantic column wreathed round with bas-reliefs of
+the old emperor's warlike deeds. In the area before it stands a grove of
+stone, consisting of the broken and unequal shafts of a vanished temple,
+still keeping a majestic order, and apparently incapable of further
+demolition. The modern edifices of the piazza (wholly built, no doubt,
+out of the spoil of its old magnificence) look down into the hollow
+space whence these pillars rise.
+
+One of the immense gray granite shafts lay in the piazza, on the verge
+of the area. It was a great, solid fact of the Past, making old Rome
+actually sensible to the touch and eye; and no study of history, nor
+force of thought, nor magic of song, could so vitally assure us that
+Rome once existed, as this sturdy specimen of what its rulers and people
+wrought.
+
+"And see!" said Kenyon, laying his hand upon it, "there is still a
+polish remaining on the hard substance of the pillar; and even now, late
+as it is, I can feel very sensibly the warmth of the noonday sun, which
+did its best to heat it through. This shaft will endure forever. The
+polish of eighteen centuries ago, as yet but half rubbed off, and the
+heat of to-day's sunshine, lingering into the night, seem almost equally
+ephemeral in relation to it."
+
+"There is comfort to be found in the pillar," remarked Miriam, "hard
+and heavy as it is. Lying here forever, as it will, it makes all human
+trouble appear but a momentary annoyance."
+
+"And human happiness as evanescent too," observed Hilda, sighing; "and
+beautiful art hardly less so! I do not love to think that this dull
+stone, merely by its massiveness, will last infinitely longer than
+any picture, in spite of the spiritual life that ought to give it
+immortality!"
+
+"My poor little Hilda," said Miriam, kissing her compassionately, "would
+you sacrifice this greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from
+the transitoriness of all things, from the right of saying, in every
+conjecture, 'This, too, will pass away,' would you give up this
+unspeakable boon, for the sake of making a picture eternal?"
+
+Their moralizing strain was interrupted by a demonstration from the rest
+of the party, who, after talking and laughing together, suddenly joined
+their voices, and shouted at full pitch,
+
+"Trajan! Trajan!"
+
+"Why do you deafen us with such an uproar?" inquired Miriam.
+
+In truth, the whole piazza had been filled with their idle vociferation;
+the echoes from the surrounding houses reverberating the cry of
+"Trajan," on all sides; as if there was a great search for that imperial
+personage, and not so much as a handful of his ashes to be found.
+
+"Why, it was a good opportunity to air our voices in this resounding
+piazza," replied one of the artists. "Besides, we had really some hopes
+of summoning Trajan to look at his column, which, you know, he never
+saw in his lifetime. Here is your model (who, they say, lived and sinned
+before Trajan's death) still wandering about Rome; and why not the
+Emperor Trajan?"
+
+"Dead emperors have very little delight in their columns, I am afraid,"
+observed Kenyon. "All that rich sculpture of Trajan's bloody warfare,
+twining from the base of the pillar to its capital, may be but an ugly
+spectacle for his ghostly eyes, if he considers that this huge, storied
+shaft must be laid before the judgment-seat, as a piece of the evidence
+of what he did in the flesh. If ever I am employed to sculpture a hero's
+monument, I shall think of this, as I put in the bas-reliefs of the
+pedestal!"
+
+"There are sermons in stones," said Hilda thoughtfully, smiling at
+Kenyon's morality; "and especially in the stones of Rome."
+
+The party moved on, but deviated a little from the straight way, in
+order to glance at the ponderous remains of the temple of Mars Ultot,
+within which a convent of nuns is now established,--a dove-cote, in the
+war-god's mansion. At only a little distance, they passed the portico
+of a Temple of Minerva, most rich and beautiful in architecture, but
+woefully gnawed by time and shattered by violence, besides being buried
+midway in the accumulation of soil, that rises over dead Rome like a
+flood tide. Within this edifice of antique sanctity, a baker's shop
+was now established, with an entrance on one side; for, everywhere, the
+remnants of old grandeur and divinity have been made available for the
+meanest necessities of today.
+
+"The baker is just drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon.
+"Do you smell how sour they are? I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge
+for the desecration of her temple) had slyly poured vinegar into the
+batch, if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in
+the acetous fermentation."
+
+They turned into the Via Alessandria, and thus gained the rear of the
+Temple of Peace, and, passing beneath its great arches, pursued their
+way along a hedge-bordered lane. In all probability, a stately Roman
+street lay buried beneath that rustic-looking pathway; for they had now
+emerged from the close and narrow avenues of the modern city, and were
+treading on a soil where the seeds of antique grandeur had not yet
+produced the squalid crop that elsewhere sprouts from them. Grassy as
+the lane was, it skirted along heaps of shapeless ruin, and the bare
+site of the vast temple that Hadrian planned and built. It terminated
+on the edge of a somewhat abrupt descent, at the foot of which, with a
+muddy ditch between, rose, in the bright moonlight, the great curving
+wall and multitudinous arches of the Coliseum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+MIRIAM'S TROUBLE
+
+
+As usual of a moonlight evening, several carriages stood at the entrance
+of this famous ruin, and the precincts and interior were anything but a
+solitude. The French sentinel on duty beneath the principal archway eyed
+our party curiously, but offered no obstacle to their admission. Within,
+the moonlight filled and flooded the great empty space; it glowed upon
+tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches, and made them even
+too distinctly visible. The splendor of the revelation took away that
+inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination
+might be assisted to build a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to
+shatter it with a more picturesque decay. Byron's celebrated description
+is better than the reality. He beheld the scene in his mind's eye,
+through the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated
+it as if with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.
+
+The party of our friends sat down, three or four of them on a prostrate
+column, another on a shapeless lump of marble, once a Roman altar;
+others on the steps of one of the Christian shrines. Goths and
+barbarians though they were, they chatted as gayly together as if they
+belonged to the gentle and pleasant race of people who now inhabit
+Italy. There was much pastime and gayety just then in the area of the
+Coliseum, where so many gladiators and Wild beasts had fought and died,
+and where so much blood of Christian martyrs had been lapped up by that
+fiercest of wild beasts, the Roman populace of yore. Some youths and
+maidens were running merry races across the open space, and playing at
+hide and seek a little way within the duskiness of the ground tier of
+arches, whence now and then you could hear the half-shriek, halflaugh of
+a frolicsome girl, whom the shadow had betrayed into a young man's
+arms. Elder groups were seated on the fragments of pillars and blocks
+of marble that lay round the verge of the arena, talking in the quick,
+short ripple of the Italian tongue. On the steps of the great black
+cross in the centre of the Coliseum sat a party singing scraps of songs,
+with much laughter and merriment between the stanzas.
+
+It was a strange place for song and mirth. That black cross marks one of
+the special blood-spots of the earth where, thousands of times over, the
+dying gladiator fell, and more of human agony has been endured for the
+mere pastime of the multitude than on the breadth of many battlefields.
+From all this crime and suffering, however, the spot has derived a more
+than common sanctity. An inscription promises seven years' indulgence,
+seven years of remission from the pains of purgatory, and earlier
+enjoyment of heavenly bliss, for each separate kiss imprinted on the
+black cross. What better use could be made of life, after middle age,
+when the accumulated sins are many and the remaining temptations few,
+than to spend it all in kissing the black cross of the Coliseum!
+
+Besides its central consecration, the whole area has been made sacred
+by a range of shrines, which are erected round the circle, each
+commemorating some scene or circumstance of the Saviour's passion and
+suffering. In accordance with an ordinary custom, a pilgrim was
+making his progress from shrine to shrine upon his knees, and saying a
+penitential prayer at each. Light-footed girls ran across the path along
+which he crept, or sported with their friends close by the shrines
+where he was kneeling. The pilgrim took no heed, and the girls meant
+no irreverence; for in Italy religion jostles along side by side
+with business and sport, after a fashion of its own, and people are
+accustomed to kneel down and pray, or see others praying, between two
+fits of merriment, or between two sins.
+
+To make an end of our description, a red twinkle of light was visible
+amid the breadth of shadow that fell across the upper part of the
+Coliseum. Now it glimmered through a line of arches, or threw a broader
+gleam as it rose out of some profound abyss of ruin; now it was muffled
+by a heap of shrubbery which had adventurously clambered to that dizzy
+height; and so the red light kept ascending to loftier and loftier
+ranges of the structure, until it stood like a star where the blue sky
+rested against the Coliseum's topmost wall. It indicated a party of
+English or Americans paying the inevitable visit by moonlight, and
+exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron's, not their own.
+
+Our company of artists sat on the fallen column, the pagan altar, and
+the steps of the Christian shrine, enjoying the moonlight and shadow,
+the present gayety and the gloomy reminiscences of the scene, in almost
+equal share. Artists, indeed, are lifted by the ideality of their
+pursuits a little way off the earth, and are therefore able to catch
+the evanescent fragrance that floats in the atmosphere of life above
+the heads of the ordinary crowd. Even if they seem endowed with little
+imagination individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman,
+common to their class, entitling them to partake somewhat more
+bountifully than other people in the thin delights of moonshine and
+romance.
+
+"How delightful this is!" said Hilda; and she sighed for very pleasure.
+
+"Yes," said Kenyon, who sat on the column, at her side. "The Coliseum
+is far more delightful, as we enjoy it now, than when eighty thousand
+persons sat squeezed together, row above row, to see their fellow
+creatures torn by lions and tigers limb from limb. What a strange
+thought that the Coliseum was really built for us, and has not come to
+its best uses till almost two thousand years after it was finished!"
+
+"The Emperor Vespasian scarcely had us in his mind," said Hilda,
+smiling; "but I thank him none the less for building it."
+
+"He gets small thanks, I fear, from the people whose bloody instincts
+he pampered," rejoined Kenyon. "Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty
+thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers
+of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they
+once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again."
+
+"You bring a Gothic horror into this peaceful moonlight scene," said
+Hilda.
+
+
+"Nay, I have good authority for peopling the Coliseum with phantoms,"
+replied the sculptor. "Do you remember that veritable scene in Benvenuto
+Cellini's autobiography, in which a necromancer of his acquaintance
+draws a magic circle--just where the black cross stands now, I
+suppose--and raises myriads of demons? Benvenuto saw them with his
+own eyes,--giants, pygmies, and other creatures of frightful aspect,
+capering and dancing on yonder walls. Those spectres must have been
+Romans, in their lifetime, and frequenters of this bloody amphitheatre."
+
+"I see a spectre, now!" said Hilda, with a little thrill of uneasiness.
+"Have you watched that pilgrim, who is going round the whole circle of
+shrines, on his knees, and praying with such fervency at every one? Now
+that he has revolved so far in his orbit, and has the moonshine on his
+face as he turns towards us, methinks I recognize him!"
+
+"And so do I," said Kenyon. "Poor Miriam! Do you think she sees him?"
+
+They looked round, and perceived that Miriam had risen from the steps of
+the shrine and disappeared. She had shrunk back, in fact, into the deep
+obscurity of an arch that opened just behind them.
+
+Donatello, whose faithful watch was no more to be eluded than that of
+a hound, had stolen after her, and became the innocent witness of a
+spectacle that had its own kind of horror. Unaware of his presence,
+and fancying herself wholly unseen, the beautiful Miriam began to
+gesticulate extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly
+abroad, stamping with her foot.
+
+It was as if she had stepped aside for an instant, solely to snatch the
+relief of a brief fit of madness. Persons in acute trouble, or laboring
+under strong excitement, with a necessity for concealing it, are prone
+to relieve their nerves in this wild way; although, when practicable,
+they find a more effectual solace in shrieking aloud.
+
+Thus, as soon as she threw off her self-control, under the dusky arches
+of the Coliseum, we may consider Miriam as a mad woman, concentrating
+the elements of a long insanity into that instant.
+
+"Signorina! signorina! have pity on me!" cried Donatello, approaching
+her; "this is too terrible!"
+
+"How dare you look, at me!" exclaimed Miriam, with a start; then,
+whispering below her breath, "men have been struck dead for a less
+offence!"
+
+"If you desire it, or need it," said Donatello humbly, "I shall not be
+loath to die."
+
+"Donatello," said Miriam, coming close to the young man, and speaking
+low, but still the almost insanity of the moment vibrating in her voice,
+"if you love yourself; if you desire those earthly blessings, such as
+you, of all men, were made for; if you would come to a good old age
+among your olive orchards and your Tuscan vines, as your forefathers
+did; if you would leave children to enjoy the same peaceful, happy,
+innocent life, then flee from me. Look not behind you! Get you gone
+without another word." He gazed sadly at her, but did not stir. "I tell
+you," Miriam went on, "there is a great evil hanging over me! I know
+it; I see it in the sky; I feel it in the air! It will overwhelm me
+as utterly as if this arch should crumble down upon our heads! It will
+crush you, too, if you stand at my side! Depart, then; and make the sign
+of the cross, as your faith bids you, when an evil spirit is nigh. Cast
+me off, or you are lost forever."
+
+A higher sentiment brightened upon Donatello's face than had hitherto
+seemed to belong to its simple expression and sensuous beauty.
+
+"I will never quit you," he said; "you cannot drive me from you."
+
+"Poor Donatello!" said Miriam in a changed tone, and rather to herself
+than him. "Is there no other that seeks me out, follows me,--is
+obstinate to share my affliction and my doom,--but only you! They call
+me beautiful; and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the
+whole world to my feet. And lo! here is my utmost need; and my beauty
+and my gifts have brought me only this poor, simple boy. Half-witted,
+they call him; and surely fit for nothing but to be happy. And I accept
+his aid! To-morrow, to-morrow, I will tell him all! Ah! what a sin to
+stain his joyous nature with the blackness of a woe like mine!"
+
+She held out her hand to him, and smiled sadly as Donatello pressed it
+to his lips. They were now about to emerge from the depth of the arch;
+but just then the kneeling pilgrim, in his revolution round the orbit of
+the shrines, had reached the one on the steps of which Miriam had been
+sitting. There, as at the other shrines, he prayed, or seemed to
+pray. It struck Kenyon, however,--who sat close by, and saw his face
+distinctly, that the suppliant was merely performing an enjoined
+penance, and without the penitence that ought to have given it effectual
+life. Even as he knelt, his eyes wandered, and Miriam soon felt that
+he had detected her, half hidden as she was within the obscurity of the
+arch.
+
+"He is evidently a good Catholic, however," whispered one of the party.
+"After all, I fear we cannot identify him with the ancient pagan who
+haunts the catacombs."
+
+"The doctors of the Propaganda may have converted him," said another;
+"they have had fifteen hundred years to perform the task."
+
+The company now deemed it time to continue their ramble. Emerging from
+a side entrance of the Coliseum, they had on their left the Arch of
+Constantine, and above it the shapeless ruins of the Palace of the
+Caesars; portions of which have taken shape anew, in mediaeval convents
+and modern villas. They turned their faces cityward, and, treading over
+the broad flagstones of the old Roman pavement, passed through the
+Arch of Titus. The moon shone brightly enough within it to show the
+seven-branched Jewish candlestick, cut in the marble of the interior.
+The original of that awful trophy lies buried, at this moment, in the
+yellow mud of the Tiber; and, could its gold of Ophir again be brought
+to light, it would be the most precious relic of past ages, in the
+estimation of both Jew and Gentile.
+
+Standing amid so much ancient dust, it is difficult to spare the reader
+the commonplaces of enthusiasm, on which hundreds of tourists have
+already insisted. Over this half-worn pavement, and beneath this Arch
+of Titus, the Roman armies had trodden in their outward march, to fight
+battles a world's width away. Returning victorious, with royal captives
+and inestimable spoil, a Roman triumph, that most gorgeous pageant of
+earthly pride, had streamed and flaunted in hundred-fold succession
+over these same flagstones, and through this yet stalwart archway. It is
+politic, however, to make few allusions to such a past; nor, if we would
+create an interest in the characters of our story, is it wise to suggest
+how Cicero's foot may have stepped on yonder stone, or how Horace was
+wont to stroll near by, making his footsteps chime with the measure of
+the ode that was ringing in his mind. The very ghosts of that massive
+and stately epoch have so much density that the actual people of to-day
+seem the thinner of the two, and stand more ghost-like by the arches
+and columns, letting the rich sculpture be discerned through their
+ill-compacted substance.
+
+The party kept onward, often meeting pairs and groups of midnight
+strollers like themselves. On such a moonlight night as this, Rome keeps
+itself awake and stirring, and is full of song and pastime, the noise of
+which mingles with your dreams, if you have gone betimes to bed. But it
+is better to be abroad, and take our own share of the enjoyable time;
+for the languor that weighs so heavily in the Roman atmosphere by day is
+lightened beneath the moon and stars.
+
+They had now reached the precincts of the Forum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
+
+
+"Let us settle it," said Kenyon, stamping his foot firmly down, "that
+this is precisely the spot where the chasm opened, into which Curtius
+precipitated his good steed and himself. Imagine the great, dusky gap,
+impenetrably deep, and with half-shaped monsters and hideous faces
+looming upward out of it, to the vast affright of the good citizens who
+peeped over the brim! There, now, is a subject, hitherto unthought of,
+for a grim and ghastly story, and, methinks, with a moral as deep as
+the gulf itself. Within it, beyond a question, there were prophetic
+visions,--intimations of all the future calamities of Rome,--shades of
+Goths, and Gauls, and even of the French soldiers of to-day. It was a
+pity to close it up so soon! I would give much for a peep into such a
+chasm."
+
+"I fancy," remarked Miriam, "that every person takes a peep into it
+in moments of gloom and despondency; that is to say, in his moments of
+deepest insight."
+
+"Where is it, then?" asked Hilda. "I never peeped into it."
+
+"Wait, and it will open for you," replied her friend. "The chasm was
+merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath
+us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin
+crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive
+stage scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the
+chasm. A footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve; and we
+must step very daintily, not to break through the crust at any moment.
+By and by, we inevitably sink! It was a foolish piece of heroism in
+Curtius to precipitate himself there, in advance; for all Rome, you see,
+has been swallowed up in that gulf, in spite of him. The Palace of the
+Caesars has gone down thither, with a hollow, rumbling sound of its
+fragments! All the temples have tumbled into it; and thousands of
+statues have been thrown after! All the armies and the triumphs have
+marched into the great chasm, with their martial music playing, as they
+stepped over the brink. All the heroes, the statesmen, and the poets!
+All piled upon poor Curtius, who thought to have saved them all! I am
+loath to smile at the self-conceit of that gallant horseman, but cannot
+well avoid it."
+
+"It grieves me to hear you speak thus, Miriam," said Hilda, whose
+natural and cheerful piety was shocked by her friend's gloomy view of
+human destinies. "It seems to me that there is no chasm, nor any hideous
+emptiness under our feet, except what the evil within us digs. If there
+be such a chasm, let us bridge it over with good thoughts and deeds, and
+we shall tread safely to the other side. It was the guilt of Rome, no
+doubt, that caused this gulf to open; and Curtius filled it up with his
+heroic self-sacrifice and patriotism, which was the best virtue that the
+old Romans knew. Every wrong thing makes the gulf deeper; every right
+one helps to fill it up. As the evil of Rome was far more than its good,
+the whole commonwealth finally sank into it, indeed, but of no original
+necessity."
+
+"Well, Hilda, it came to the same thing at last," answered Miriam
+despondingly.
+
+"Doubtless, too," resumed the sculptor (for his imagination was greatly
+excited by the idea of this wondrous chasm), "all the blood that the
+Romans shed, whether on battlefields, or in the Coliseum, or on the
+cross,--in whatever public or private murder,--ran into this fatal gulf,
+and formed a mighty subterranean lake of gore, right beneath our feet.
+The blood from the thirty wounds in Caesar's breast flowed hitherward,
+and that pure little rivulet from Virginia's bosom, too! Virginia,
+beyond all question, was stabbed by her father, precisely where we are
+standing."
+
+"Then the spot is hallowed forever!" said Hilda.
+
+"Is there such blessed potency in bloodshed?" asked Miriam. "Nay, Hilda,
+do not protest! I take your meaning rightly."
+
+They again moved forward. And still, from the Forum and the Via Sacra,
+from beneath the arches of the Temple of Peace on one side, and the
+acclivity of the Palace of the Caesars on the other, there arose singing
+voices of parties that were strolling through the moonlight. Thus,
+the air was full of kindred melodies that encountered one another, and
+twined themselves into a broad, vague music, out of which no single
+strain could be disentangled. These good examples, as well as the
+harmonious influences of the hour, incited our artist friends to make
+proof of their own vocal powers. With what skill and breath they had,
+they set up a choral strain,--"Hail, Columbia!" we believe, which
+those old Roman echoes must have found it exceeding difficult to repeat
+aright. Even Hilda poured the slender sweetness of her note into her
+country's song. Miriam was at first silent, being perhaps unfamiliar
+with the air and burden. But suddenly she threw out such a swell and
+gush of sound, that it seemed to pervade the whole choir of other
+voices, and then to rise above them all, and become audible in what
+would else have been thee silence of an upper region. That volume of
+melodious voice was one of the tokens of a great trouble. There had long
+been an impulse upon her--amounting, at last, to a necessity to shriek
+aloud; but she had struggled against it, till the thunderous anthem gave
+her an opportunity to relieve her heart by a great cry.
+
+They passed the solitary Column of Phocas, and looked down into the
+excavated space, where a confusion of pillars, arches, pavements, and
+shattered blocks and shafts--the crumbs of various ruin dropped from the
+devouring maw of Time stand, or lie, at the base of the Capitoline Hill.
+That renowned hillock (for it is little more) now arose abruptly above
+them. The ponderous masonry, with which the hillside is built up, is as
+old as Rome itself, and looks likely to endure while the world retains
+any substance or permanence. It once sustained the Capitol, and now
+bears up the great pile which the mediaeval builders raised on the
+antique foundation, and that still loftier tower, which looks abroad
+upon a larger page of deeper historic interest than any other scene
+can show. On the same pedestal of Roman masonry, other structures will
+doubtless rise, and vanish like ephemeral things.
+
+To a spectator on the spot, it is remarkable that the events of Roman
+history, and Roman life itself, appear not so distant as the Gothic ages
+which succeeded them. We stand in the Forum, or on the height of the
+Capitol, and seem to see the Roman epoch close at hand. We forget that
+a chasm extends between it and ourselves, in which lie all those dark,
+rude, unlettered centuries, around the birth-time of Christianity, as
+well as the age of chivalry and romance, the feudal system, and the
+infancy of a better civilization than that of Rome. Or, if we remember
+these mediaeval times, they look further off than the Augustan age. The
+reason may be, that the old Roman literature survives, and creates for
+us an intimacy with the classic ages, which we have no means of forming
+with the subsequent ones.
+
+The Italian climate, moreover, robs age of its reverence and makes it
+look newer than it is. Not the Coliseum, nor the tombs of the Appian
+Way, nor the oldest pillar in the Forum, nor any other Roman ruin, be
+it as dilapidated as it may, ever give the impression of venerable
+antiquity which we gather, along with the ivy, from the gray walls of an
+English abbey or castle. And yet every brick or stone, which we pick up
+among the former, had fallen ages before the foundation of the latter
+was begun. This is owing to the kindliness with which Natures takes an
+English ruin to her heart, covering it with ivy, as tenderly as Robin
+Redbreast covered the dead babes with forest leaves. She strives to make
+it a part of herself, gradually obliterating the handiwork of man, and
+supplanting it with her own mosses and trailing verdure, till she has
+won the whole structure back. But, in Italy, whenever man has once hewn
+a stone, Nature forthwith relinquishes her right to it, and never lays
+her finger on it again. Age after age finds it bare and naked, in the
+barren sunshine, and leaves it so. Besides this natural disadvantage,
+too, each succeeding century, in Rome, has done its best to ruin the
+very ruins, so far as their picturesque effect is concerned, by stealing
+away the marble and hewn stone, and leaving only yellow bricks, which
+never can look venerable.
+
+
+The party ascended the winding way that leads from the Forum to the
+Piazza of the Campidoglio on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. They
+stood awhile to contemplate the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus
+Aurelius. The moonlight glistened upon traces of the gilding which
+had once covered both rider and steed; these were almost gone, but the
+aspect of dignity was still perfect, clothing the figure as it were with
+an imperial robe of light. It is the most majestic representation of
+the kingly character that ever the world has seen. A sight of the old
+heathen emperor is enough to create an evanescent sentiment of loyalty
+even in a democratic bosom, so august does he look, so fit to rule,
+so worthy of man's profoundest homage and obedience, so inevitably
+attractive of his love. He stretches forth his hand with an air of grand
+beneficence and unlimited authority, as if uttering a decree from which
+no appeal was permissible, but in which the obedient subject would
+find his highest interests consulted; a command that was in itself a
+benediction.
+
+"The sculptor of this statue knew what a king should be," observed
+Kenyon, "and knew, likewise, the heart of mankind, and how it craves a
+true ruler, under whatever title, as a child its father."
+
+"O, if there were but one such man as this?" exclaimed Miriam. "One such
+man in an age, and one in all the world; then how speedily would the
+strife, wickedness, and sorrow of us poor creatures be relieved. We
+would come to him with our griefs, whatever they might be,--even a poor,
+frail woman burdened with her heavy heart,--and lay them at his feet,
+and never need to take them up again. The rightful king would see to
+all."
+
+"What an idea of the regal office and duty!" said Kenyon, with a smile.
+"It is a woman's idea of the whole matter to perfection. It is Hilda's,
+too, no doubt?"
+
+"No," answered the quiet Hilda; "I should never look for such assistance
+from an earthly king."
+
+"Hilda, my religious Hilda," whispered Miriam, suddenly drawing the girl
+close to her, "do you know how it is with me? I would give all I have or
+hope--my life, O how freely--for one instant of your trust in God! You
+little guess my need of it. You really think, then, that He sees and
+cares for us?"
+
+"Miriam, you frighten me."
+
+"Hush, hush? do not let them hear yet!" whispered Miriam. "I frighten
+you, you say; for Heaven's sake, how? Am I strange? Is there anything
+wild in my behavior?"
+
+"Only for that moment," replied Hilda, "because you seemed to doubt
+God's providence."
+
+"We will talk of that another time," said her friend. "Just now it is
+very dark to me."
+
+On the left of the Piazza of the Campidoglio, as you face cityward, and
+at the head of the long and stately flight of steps descending from the
+Capitoline Hill to the level of lower Rome, there is a narrow lane
+or passage. Into this the party of our friends now turned. The path
+ascended a little, and ran along under the walls of a palace, but soon
+passed through a gateway, and terminated in a small paved courtyard. It
+was bordered by a low parapet.
+
+The spot, for some reason or other, impressed them as exceedingly
+lonely. On one side was the great height of the palace, with the
+moonshine falling over it, and showing all the windows barred and
+shuttered. Not a human eye could look down into the little courtyard,
+even if the seemingly deserted palace had a tenant. On all other sides
+of its narrow compass there was nothing but the parapet, which as it now
+appeared was built right on the edge of a steep precipice. Gazing
+from its imminent brow, the party beheld a crowded confusion of roofs
+spreading over the whole space between them and the line of hills that
+lay beyond the Tiber. A long, misty wreath, just dense enough to catch
+a little of the moonshine, floated above the houses, midway towards the
+hilly line, and showed the course of the unseen river. Far away on the
+right, the moon gleamed on the dome of St. Peter's as well as on many
+lesser and nearer domes.
+
+"What a beautiful view of the city!" exclaimed Hilda; "and I never saw
+Rome from this point before."
+
+"It ought to afford a good prospect," said the sculptor; "for it
+was from this point--at least we are at liberty to think so, if we
+choose--that many a famous Roman caught his last glimpse of his native
+city, and of all other earthly things. This is one of the sides of the
+Tarpeian Rock. Look over the parapet, and see what a sheer tumble there
+might still be for a traitor, in spite of the thirty feet of soil that
+have accumulated at the foot of the precipice."
+
+They all bent over, and saw that the cliff fell perpendicularly downward
+to about the depth, or rather more, at which the tall palace rose in
+height above their heads. Not that it was still the natural, shaggy
+front of the original precipice; for it appeared to be cased in ancient
+stonework, through which the primeval rock showed its face here and
+there grimly and doubtfully. Mosses grew on the slight projections, and
+little shrubs sprouted out of the crevices, but could not much soften
+the stern aspect of the cliff. Brightly as the Italian moonlight fell
+adown the height, it scarcely showed what portion of it was man's work
+and what was nature's, but left it all in very much the same kind of
+ambiguity and half-knowledge in which antiquarians generally leave the
+identity of Roman remains.
+
+The roofs of some poor-looking houses, which had been built against the
+base and sides of the cliff, rose nearly midway to the top; but from an
+angle of the parapet there was a precipitous plunge straight downward
+into a stonepaved court.
+
+"I prefer this to any other site as having been veritably the Traitor's
+Leap," said Kenyon, "because it was so convenient to the Capitol. It was
+an admirable idea of those stern old fellows to fling their political
+criminals down from the very summit on which stood the Senate House and
+Jove's Temple, emblems of the institutions which they sought to violate.
+It symbolizes how sudden was the fall in those days from the utmost
+height of ambition to its profoundest ruin."
+
+"Come, come; it is midnight," cried another artist, "too late to be
+moralizing here. We are literally dreaming on the edge of a precipice.
+Let us go home."
+
+"It is time, indeed," said Hilda.
+
+The sculptor was not without hopes that he might be favored with the
+sweet charge of escorting Hilda to the foot of her tower. Accordingly,
+when the party prepared to turn back, he offered her his arm. Hilda at
+first accepted it; but when they had partly threaded the passage between
+the little courtyard and the Piazza del Campidoglio, she discovered that
+Miriam had remained behind.
+
+"I must go back," said she, withdrawing her arm from Kenyon's; "but pray
+do not come with me. Several times this evening I have had a fancy that
+Miriam had something on her mind, some sorrow or perplexity, which,
+perhaps, it would relieve her to tell me about. No, no; do not turn
+back! Donatello will be a sufficient guardian for Miriam and me."
+
+The sculptor was a good deal mortified, and perhaps a little angry: but
+he knew Hilda's mood of gentle decision and independence too well not to
+obey her. He therefore suffered the fearless maiden to return alone.
+
+Meanwhile Miriam had not noticed the departure of the rest of the
+company; she remained on the edge of the precipice and Donatello along
+with her.
+
+"It would be a fatal fall, still," she said to herself, looking over the
+parapet, and shuddering as her eye measured the depth. "Yes; surely yes!
+Even without the weight of an overburdened heart, a human body would
+fall heavily enough upon those stones to shake all its joints asunder.
+How soon it would be over!"
+
+Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed
+closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet
+and trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination
+which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling
+himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing
+hastily back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than
+before. He then stood silent a brief space, struggling, perhaps, to make
+himself conscious of the historic associations of the scene.
+
+"What are you thinking of, Donatello?" asked Miriam.
+
+"Who are they," said he, looking earnestly in her face, "who have been
+flung over here in days gone by?"
+
+"Men that cumbered the world," she replied. "Men whose lives were the
+bane of their fellow creatures. Men who poisoned the air, which is the
+common breath of all, for their own selfish purposes. There was short
+work with such men in old Roman times. Just in the moment of their
+triumph, a hand, as of an avenging giant, clutched them, and dashed the
+wretches down this precipice."
+
+"Was it well done?" asked the young man.
+
+"It was well done," answered Miriam; "innocent persons were saved by the
+destruction of a guilty one, who deserved his doom."
+
+While this brief conversation passed, Donatello had once or twice
+glanced aside with a watchful air, just as a hound may often be seen to
+take sidelong note of some suspicious object, while he gives his more
+direct attention to something nearer at, hand. Miriam seemed now first
+to become aware of the silence that had followed upon the cheerful talk
+and laughter of a few moments before.
+
+Looking round, she perceived that all her company of merry friends had
+retired, and Hilda, too, in whose soft and quiet presence she had always
+an indescribable feeling of security. All gone; and only herself and
+Donatello left hanging over the brow of the ominous precipice.
+
+Not so, however; not entirely alone! In the basement wall of the palace,
+shaded from the moon, there was a deep, empty niche, that had probably
+once contained a statue; not empty, either; for a figure now came forth
+from it and approached Miriam. She must have had cause to dread some
+unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was
+the very crisis of her calamity; for as he drew near, such a cold, sick
+despair crept over her that it impeded her breath, and benumbed her
+natural promptitude of thought. Miriam seemed dreamily to remember
+falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild
+moment, she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well
+distinguish what was done and suffered; no, not even whether she were
+really an actor and sufferer in the scene.
+
+Hilda, meanwhile, had separated herself from the sculptor, and turned
+back to rejoin her friend. At a distance, she still heard the mirth of
+her late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the
+Capitoline Hill; they had set up a new stave of melody, in which her
+own soft voice, as well as the powerful sweetness of Miriam's, was sadly
+missed.
+
+The door of the little courtyard had swung upon its hinges, and
+partly closed itself. Hilda (whose native gentleness pervaded all her
+movements) was quietly opening it, when she was startled, midway, by the
+noise of a struggle within, beginning and ending all in one breathless
+instant. Along with it, or closely succeeding it, was a loud, fearful
+cry, which quivered upward through the air, and sank quivering
+downward to the earth. Then, a silence! Poor Hilda had looked into the
+court-yard, and saw the whole quick passage of a deed, which took but
+that little time to grave itself in the eternal adamant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
+
+
+The door of the courtyard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own
+accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped her
+hands, and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have
+dilated, and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly
+inspired him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him
+an intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom
+we have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was gone
+forever.
+
+"What have you done?" said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.
+
+The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's face, and now flashed
+out again from his eyes.
+
+"I did what ought to be done to a traitor!" he replied. "I did what your
+eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over
+the precipice!"
+
+These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her
+eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it. But, alas!
+looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she
+could not deny--she was not sure whether it might be so, or no--that a
+wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in
+his mortal peril. Was it horror?--or ecstasy? or both in one? Be the
+emotion what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello
+flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek went
+quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had come
+an unutterable horror.
+
+"And my eyes bade you do it!" repeated she.
+
+They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if
+some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable.
+On the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or
+nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched
+out, as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square
+stones. But there was no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap of
+mortality while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do.
+No stir; not a finger moved!
+
+"You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!" said she. "Stone
+dead! Would I were so, too!"
+
+"Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still in
+the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. "There
+was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath
+or two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one
+glance, when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain him
+against your will,--say that he died without your whole consent,--and,
+in another breath, you shall see me lying beside him."
+
+"O, never!" cried Miriam. "My one, own friend! Never, never, never!"
+
+She turned to him,--the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,--she turned
+to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had
+drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a
+clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror
+and agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of
+rapture.
+
+"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!" said she; "my heart consented to
+what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, for
+time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!"
+
+They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure
+themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then
+they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard,
+arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heedful not to
+sever themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear
+of the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them
+in solitude. Their deed--the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam
+accepted on the instant--had wreathed itself, as she said, like a
+serpent, in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew them
+into one, by its terrible contractile power. It was closer than a
+marriage bond. So intimate, in those first moments, was the union, that
+it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that
+they were released from the chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special
+law, had been created for them alone. The world could not come near
+them; they were safe!
+
+When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol,
+there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter. Swift, indeed, had
+been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! This was still the
+merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions. They
+recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung
+in cadence with their own. But they were familiar voices no more; they
+sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so
+remote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in
+the moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them. But
+how close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste,
+that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them
+one within the other!
+
+"O friend!" cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it
+took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken
+before, "O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionship
+that knits our heart-strings together?"
+
+"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath; we live one
+life!"
+
+"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago,
+I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could come
+near enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant all is
+changed! There can be no more loneliness!"
+
+"None, Miriam!" said Donatello.
+
+"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which
+had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of
+passion. "None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have
+committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement
+two other lives for evermore."
+
+"For evermore, Miriam!" said Donatello; "cemented with his blood!"
+
+The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be
+that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had
+not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union
+that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and
+grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less
+strictly for that.
+
+
+"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by her
+sympathy, the pang that was in his heart. "The deed has done its office,
+and has no existence any more."
+
+They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled
+from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly
+through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of
+rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic
+sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark
+sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an
+insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy
+innocence that was forever lost to them.
+
+As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went
+onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and
+aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief
+nobility of carriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they,
+too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages
+long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam's
+suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the
+old site of Pompey's Forum.
+
+"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood
+like ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of
+Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"
+
+"Are they our brethren, now?" asked Donatello.
+
+"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--"and many another, whom the world
+little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we
+have done within this hour!"
+
+And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclusion, the
+remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one
+companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no
+such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of
+criminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on
+it,--or had poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or
+clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few
+last breaths,--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with
+their two hands? Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terrible
+thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of
+human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate
+sin,--makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover were
+not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of
+guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.
+
+"But not now; not yet," she murmured to herself. "To-night, at least,
+there shall be no remorse!"
+
+Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a
+street, at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower. There was a
+light in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and the
+glimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars. Miriam
+drew Donatello's arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some
+distance looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throw
+it open. She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards
+the sky.
+
+"The good, pure child! She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with a
+kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend. Then her
+own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her
+voice, "Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!"
+
+Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell. The window
+was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy
+curtain. Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned
+spirit was shut out of heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+THE BURIAL CHANT
+
+
+The Church of the Capuchins (where, as the reader may remember, some of
+our acquaintances had made an engagement to meet) stands a little aside
+from the Piazza Barberini. Thither, at the hour agreed upon, on the
+morning after the scenes last described, Miriam and Donatello directed
+their steps. At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their
+trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus
+put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that
+if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
+
+Yet how tame and wearisome is the impression of all ordinary things in
+the contrast with such a fact! How sick and tremulous, the next morning,
+is the spirit that has dared so much only the night before! How icy cold
+is the heart, when the fervor, the wild ecstasy of passion has faded
+away, and sunk down among the dead ashes of the fire that blazed so
+fiercely, and was fed by the very substance of its life! How faintly
+does the criminal stagger onward, lacking the impulse of that strong
+madness that hurried him into guilt, and treacherously deserts him in
+the midst of it!
+
+When Miriam and Donatello drew near the church, they found only Kenyon
+awaiting them on the steps. Hilda had likewise promised to be of the
+party, but had not yet appeared. Meeting the sculptor, Miriam put a
+force upon herself and succeeded in creating an artificial flow
+of spirits, which, to any but the nicest observation, was quite as
+effective as a natural one. She spoke sympathizingly to the sculptor on
+the subject of Hilda's absence, and somewhat annoyed him by alluding in
+Donatello's hearing to an attachment which had never been openly avowed,
+though perhaps plainly enough betrayed. He fancied that Miriam did not
+quite recognize the limits of the strictest delicacy; he even went so
+far as to generalize, and conclude within himself, that this deficiency
+is a more general failing in woman than in man, the highest refinement
+being a masculine attribute.
+
+But the idea was unjust to the sex at large, and especially so to this
+poor Miriam, who was hardly responsible for her frantic efforts to be
+gay. Possibly, moreover, the nice action of the mind is set ajar by any
+violent shock, as of great misfortune or great crime, so that the finer
+perceptions may be blurred thenceforth, and the effect be traceable in
+all the minutest conduct of life.
+
+"Did you see anything of the dear child after you left us?" asked
+Miriam, still keeping Hilda as her topic of conversation. "I missed her
+sadly on my way homeward; for nothing insures me such delightful and
+innocent dreams (I have experienced it twenty times) as a talk late in
+the evening with Hilda."
+
+"So I should imagine," said the sculptor gravely; "but it is an
+advantage that I have little or no opportunity of enjoying. I know not
+what became of Hilda after my parting from you. She was not especially
+my companion in any part of our walk. The last I saw of her she
+was hastening back to rejoin you in the courtyard of the Palazzo
+Caffarelli."
+
+"Impossible!" cried Miriam, starting.
+
+"Then did you not see her again?" inquired Kenyon, in some alarm.
+
+"Not there," answered Miriam quietly; "indeed, I followed pretty closely
+on the heels of the rest of the party. But do not be alarmed on Hilda's
+account; the Virgin is bound to watch over the good child, for the sake
+of the piety with which she keeps the lamp alight at her shrine. And
+besides, I have always felt that Hilda is just as safe in these evil
+streets of Rome as her white doves when they fly downwards from the
+tower top, and run to and fro among the horses' feet. There is certainly
+a providence on purpose for Hilda, if for no other human creature."
+
+"I religiously believe it," rejoined the sculptor; "and yet my mind
+would be the easier, if I knew that she had returned safely to her
+tower."
+
+"Then make yourself quite easy," answered Miriam. "I saw her (and it
+is the last sweet sight that I remember) leaning from her window midway
+between earth and sky!"
+
+Kenyon now looked at Donatello.
+
+"You seem out of spirits, my dear friend," he observed. "This languid
+Roman atmosphere is not the airy wine that you were accustomed to
+breathe at home. I have not forgotten your hospitable invitation to
+meet you this summer at your castle among the Apennines. It is my fixed
+purpose to come, I assure you. We shall both be the better for some deep
+draughts of the mountain breezes."
+
+"It may he," said Donatello, with unwonted sombreness; "the old house
+seemed joyous when I was a child. But as I remember it now it was a grim
+place, too."
+
+The sculptor looked more attentively at the young man, and was surprised
+and alarmed to observe how entirely the fine, fresh glow of animal
+spirits had departed out of his face. Hitherto, moreover, even while he
+was standing perfectly still, there had been a kind of possible gambol
+indicated in his aspect. It was quite gone now. All his youthful gayety,
+and with it his simplicity of manner, was eclipsed, if not utterly
+extinct.
+
+
+"You are surely ill, my dear fellow," exclaimed Kenyon.
+
+"Am I? Perhaps so," said Donatello indifferently; "I never have been
+ill, and know not what it may be."
+
+"Do not make the poor lad fancy-sink," whispered Miriam, pulling the
+sculptor's sleeve. "He is of a nature to lie down and die at once, if he
+finds himself drawing such melancholy breaths as we ordinary people are
+enforced to burden our lungs withal. But we must get him away from this
+old, dreamy and dreary Rome, where nobody but himself ever thought of
+being gay. Its influences are too heavy to sustain the life of such a
+creature."
+
+The above conversation had passed chiefly on the steps of the
+Cappuccini; and, having said so much, Miriam lifted the leathern curtain
+that hangs before all church-doors in italy. "Hilda has forgotten her
+appointment," she observed, "or else her maiden slumbers are very sound
+this morning. We will wait for her no longer."
+
+They entered the nave. The interior of the church was of moderate
+compass, but of good architecture, with a vaulted roof over the nave,
+and a row of dusky chapels on either side of it instead of the customary
+side-aisles. Each chapel had its saintly shrine, hung round with
+offerings; its picture above the altar, although closely veiled, if by
+any painter of renown; and its hallowed tapers, burning continually, to
+set alight the devotion of the worshippers. The pavement of the nave was
+chiefly of marble, and looked old and broken, and was shabbily patched
+here and there with tiles of brick; it was inlaid, moreover, with
+tombstones of the mediaeval taste, on which were quaintly sculptured
+borders, figures, and portraits in bas-relief, and Latin epitaphs,
+now grown illegible by the tread of footsteps over them. The church
+appertains to a convent of Capuchin monks; and, as usually happens when
+a reverend brotherhood have such an edifice in charge, the floor seemed
+never to have been scrubbed or swept, and had as little the aspect of
+sanctity as a kennel; whereas, in all churches of nunneries, the maiden
+sisterhood invariably show the purity of their own hearts by the virgin
+cleanliness and visible consecration of the walls and pavement.
+
+As our friends entered the church, their eyes rested at once on a
+remarkable object in the centre of the nave. It was either the actual
+body, or, as might rather have been supposed at first glance, the
+cunningly wrought waxen face and suitably draped figure of a dead monk.
+This image of wax or clay-cold reality, whichever it might be, lay on
+a slightly elevated bier, with three tall candles burning on each side,
+another tall candle at the head, and another at the foot. There was
+music, too; in harmony with so funereal a spectacle. From beneath
+the pavement of the church came the deep, lugubrious strain of a De
+Profundis, which sounded like an utterance of the tomb itself; so
+dismally did it rumble through the burial vaults, and ooze up among the
+flat gravestones and sad epitaphs, filling the church as with a gloomy
+mist.
+
+"I must look more closely at that dead monk before we leave the church,"
+remarked the sculptor. "In the study of my art, I have gained many a
+hint from the dead which the living could never have given me."
+
+"I can well imagine it," answered Miriam. "One clay image is readily
+copied from another. But let us first see Guido's picture. The light is
+favorable now."
+
+Accordingly, they turned into the first chapel on the right hand, as you
+enter the nave; and there they beheld,--not the picture, indeed,--but
+a closely drawn curtain. The churchmen of Italy make no scruple of
+sacrificing the very purpose for which a work of sacred art has been
+created; that of opening the way; for religious sentiment through the
+quick medium of sight, by bringing angels, saints, and martyrs down
+visibly upon earth; of sacrificing this high purpose, and, for aught
+they know, the welfare of many souls along with it, to the hope of a
+paltry fee. Every work by an artist of celebrity is hidden behind a
+veil, and seldom revealed, except to Protestants, who scorn it as an
+object of devotion, and value it only for its artistic merit.
+
+The sacristan was quickly found, however, and lost no time in disclosing
+the youthful Archangel, setting his divine foot on the head of his
+fallen adversary. It was an image of that greatest of future events,
+which we hope for so ardently, at least, while we are young,--but find
+so very long in coming, the triumph of goodness over the evil principle.
+
+"Where can Hilda be?" exclaimed Kenyon. "It is not her custom ever to
+fail in an engagement; and the present one was made entirely on
+her account. Except herself, you know, we were all agreed in our
+recollection of the picture."
+
+"But we were wrong, and Hilda right, as you perceive," said Miriam,
+directing his attention to the point on which their dispute of the night
+before had arisen. "It is not easy to detect her astray as regards any
+picture on which those clear, soft eyes of hers have ever rested."
+
+"And she has studied and admired few pictures so much as this," observed
+the sculptor. "No wonder; for there is hardly another so beautiful in
+the world. What an expression of heavenly severity in the Archangel's
+face! There is a degree of pain, trouble, and disgust at being brought
+in contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it;
+and yet a celestial tranquillity pervades his whole being."
+
+"I have never been able," said Miriam, "to admire this picture nearly so
+much as Hilda does, in its moral and intellectual aspect. If it cost her
+more trouble to be good, if her soul were less white and pure, she would
+be a more competent critic of this picture, and would estimate it not
+half so high. I see its defects today more clearly than ever before."
+
+"What are some of them?" asked Kenyon.
+
+"That Archangel, now," Miriam continued; "how fair he looks, with his
+unruffled wings, with his unhacked sword, and clad in his bright
+armor, and that exquisitely fitting sky-blue tunic, cut in the latest
+Paradisiacal mode! What a dainty air of the first celestial society!
+With what half-scornful delicacy he sets his prettily sandalled foot
+on the head of his prostrate foe! But, is it thus that virtue looks the
+moment after its death struggle with evil? No, no; I could have told
+Guido better. A full third of the Archangel's feathers should have been
+torn from his wings; the rest all ruffled, till they looked like Satan's
+own! His sword should be streaming with blood, and perhaps broken
+halfway to the hilt; his armor crushed, his robes rent, his breast gory;
+a bleeding gash on his brow, cutting right across the stern scowl of
+battle! He should press his foot hard down upon the old serpent, as
+if his very soul depended upon it, feeling him squirm mightily, and
+doubting whether the fight were half over yet, and how the victory might
+turn! And, with all this fierceness, this grimness, this unutterable
+horror, there should still be something high, tender, and holy in
+Michael's eyes, and around his mouth. But the battle never was such a
+child's play as Guido's dapper Archangel seems to have found it."
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Miriam," cried Kenyon, astonished at the wild energy
+of her talk; "paint the picture of man's struggle against sin according
+to your own idea! I think it will be a masterpiece."
+
+"The picture would have its share of truth, I assure you," she answered;
+"but I am sadly afraid the victory would fail on the wrong side. Just
+fancy a smoke-blackened, fiery-eyed demon bestriding that nice young
+angel, clutching his white throat with one of his hinder claws; and
+giving a triumphant whisk of his scaly tail, with a poisonous dart at
+the end of it! That is what they risk, poor souls, who do battle with
+Michael's enemy."
+
+It now, perhaps, struck Miriam that her mental disquietude was impelling
+her to an undue vivacity; for she paused, and turned away from the
+picture, without saying a word more about it. All this while, moreover,
+Donatello had been very ill at ease, casting awe-stricken and inquiring
+glances at the dead monk; as if he could look nowhere but at that
+ghastly object, merely because it shocked him. Death has probably a
+peculiar horror and ugliness, when forced upon the contemplation of a
+person so naturally joyous as Donatello, who lived with completeness in
+the present moment, and was able to form but vague images of the future.
+
+"What is the matter, Donatello?" whispered Miriam soothingly. "You are
+quite in a tremble, my poor friend! What is it?"
+
+"This awful chant from beneath the church," answered Donatello; "it
+oppresses me; the air is so heavy with it that I can scarcely draw my
+breath. And yonder dead monk! I feel as if he were lying right across my
+heart."
+
+"Take courage!" whispered she again "come, we will approach close to
+the dead monk. The only way, in such cases, is to stare the ugly horror
+right in the face; never a sidelong glance, nor half-look, for those are
+what show a frightfull thing in its frightfullest aspect. Lean on me,
+dearest friend! My heart is very strong for both of us. Be brave; and
+all is well."
+
+Donatello hung back for a moment, but then pressed close to Miriam's
+side, and suffered her to lead him up to the bier. The sculptor
+followed. A number of persons, chiefly women, with several children
+among them, were standing about the corpse; and as our three friends
+drew nigh, a mother knelt down, and caused her little boy to kneel,
+both kissing the beads and crucifix that hung from the monk's girdle.
+Possibly he had died in the odor of sanctity; or, at all events, death
+and his brown frock and cowl made a sacred image of this reverend
+father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
+
+
+The dead monk was clad, as when alive, in the brown woollen frock of
+the Capuchins, with the hood drawn over his head, but so as to leave the
+features and a portion of the beard uncovered. His rosary and cross hung
+at his side; his hands were folded over his breast; his feet (he was of
+a barefooted order in his lifetime, and continued so in death) protruded
+from beneath his habit, stiff and stark, with a more waxen look than
+even his face. They were tied together at the ankles with a black
+ribbon.
+
+The countenance, as we have already said, was fully displayed. It had a
+purplish hue upon it, unlike the paleness of an ordinary corpse, but
+as little resembling the flush of natural life. The eyelids were
+but partially drawn down, and showed the eyeballs beneath; as if the
+deceased friar were stealing a glimpse at the bystanders, to watch
+whether they were duly impressed with the solemnity of his obsequies.
+The shaggy eyebrows gave sternness to the look. Miriam passed between
+two of the lighted candles, and stood close beside the bier.
+
+"My God!" murmured she. "What is this?"
+
+She grasped Donatello's hand, and, at the same instant, felt him give a
+convulsive shudder, which she knew to have been caused by a sudden
+and terrible throb of the heart. His hand, by an instantaneous change,
+became like ice within hers, which likewise grew so icy that their
+insensible fingers might have rattled, one against the other. No wonder
+that their blood curdled; no wonder that their hearts leaped and paused!
+The dead face of the monk, gazing at them beneath its half-closed
+eyelids, was the same visage that had glared upon their naked souls, the
+past midnight, as Donatello flung him over the precipice.
+
+The sculptor was standing at the foot of the bier, and had not yet seen
+the monk's features.
+
+"Those naked feet!" said he. "I know not why, but they affect me
+strangely. They have walked to and fro over the hard pavements of Rome,
+and through a hundred other rough ways of this life, where the monk went
+begging for his brotherhood; along the cloisters and dreary corridors
+of his convent, too, from his youth upward! It is a suggestive idea, to
+track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden,
+ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and
+(cold as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand."
+
+As his companions, whom the sculptor supposed to be close by him, made
+no response to his fanciful musing, he looked up, and saw them at the
+head of the bier. He advanced thither himself.
+
+"Ha!" exclaimed he.
+
+He cast a horror-stricken and bewildered glance at Miriam, but withdrew
+it immediately. Not that he had any definite suspicion, or, it may be,
+even a remote idea, that she could be held responsible in the least
+degree for this man's sudden death. In truth, it seemed too wild a
+thought to connect, in reality, Miriam's persecutor of many past months
+and the vagabond of the preceding night, with the dead Capuchin
+of to-day. It resembled one of those unaccountable changes and
+interminglings of identity, which so often occur among the personages
+of a dream. But Kenyon, as befitted the professor of an imaginative art,
+was endowed with an exceedingly quick sensibility, which was apt to give
+him intimations of the true state of matters that lay beyond his actual
+vision. There was a whisper in his ear; it said, "Hush!" Without asking
+himself wherefore, he resolved to be silent as regarded the mysterious
+discovery which he had made, and to leave any remark or exclamation
+to be voluntarily offered by Miriam. If she never spoke, then let the
+riddle be unsolved.
+
+And now occurred a circumstance that would seem too fantastic to be
+told, if it had not actually happened, precisely as we set it down. As
+the three friends stood by the bier, they saw that a little stream of
+blood had begun to ooze from the dead monk's nostrils; it crept slowly
+towards the thicket of his beard, where, in the course of a moment or
+two, it hid itself.
+
+"How strange!" ejaculated Kenyon. "The monk died of apoplexy, I suppose,
+or by some sudden accident, and the blood has not yet congealed."
+
+"Do you consider that a sufficient explanation?" asked Miriam, with a
+smile from which the sculptor involuntarily turned away his eyes. "Does
+it satisfy you?"
+
+"And why not?" he inquired.
+
+"Of course, you know the old superstition about this phenomenon of blood
+flowing from a dead body," she rejoined. "How can we tell but that the
+murderer of this monk (or, possibly, it may be only that privileged
+murderer, his physician) may have just entered the church?"
+
+"I cannot jest about it," said Kenyon. "It is an ugly sight!"
+
+"True, true; horrible to see, or dream of!" she replied, with one of
+those long, tremulous sighs, which so often betray a sick heart by
+escaping unexpectedly. "We will not look at it any more. Come away,
+Donatello. Let us escape from this dismal church. The sunshine will do
+you good."
+
+When had ever a woman such a trial to sustain as this! By no possible
+supposition could Miriam explain the identity of the dead Capuchin,
+quietly and decorously laid out in the nave of his convent church, with
+that of her murdered persecutor, flung heedlessly at the foot of the
+precipice. The effect upon her imagination was as if a strange and
+unknown corpse had miraculously, while she was gazing at it, assumed the
+likeness of that face, so terrible henceforth in her remembrance. It was
+a symbol, perhaps, of the deadly iteration with which she was doomed
+to behold the image of her crime reflected back upon her in a thousand
+ways, and converting the great, calm face of Nature, in the whole, and
+in its innumerable details, into a manifold reminiscence of that one
+dead visage.
+
+No sooner had Miriam turned away from the bier, and gone a few steps,
+than she fancied the likeness altogether an illusion, which would vanish
+at a closer and colder view. She must look at it again, therefore, and
+at once; or else the grave would close over the face, and leave the
+awful fantasy that had connected itself therewith fixed ineffaceably in
+her brain.
+
+"Wait for me, one moment!" she said to her companions. "Only a moment!"
+
+So she went back, and gazed once more at the corpse. Yes; these were
+the features that Miriam had known so well; this was the visage that she
+remembered from a far longer date than the most intimate of her friends
+suspected; this form of clay had held the evil spirit which blasted her
+sweet youth, and compelled her, as it were, to stain her womanhood
+with crime. But, whether it were the majesty of death, or something
+originally noble and lofty in the character of the dead, which the soul
+had stamped upon the features, as it left them; so it was that Miriam
+now quailed and shook, not for the vulgar horror of the spectacle, but
+for the severe, reproachful glance that seemed to come from between
+those half-closed lids. True, there had been nothing, in his lifetime,
+viler than this man. She knew it; there was no other fact within her
+consciousness that she felt to be so certain; and yet, because her
+persecutor found himself safe and irrefutable in death, he frowned upon
+his victim, and threw back the blame on her!
+
+"Is it thou, indeed?" she murmured, under her breath. "Then thou hast
+no right to scowl upon me so! But art thou real, or a vision?" She bent
+down over the dead monk, till one of her rich curls brushed against his
+forehead. She touched one of his folded hands with her finger.
+
+"It is he," said Miriam. "There is the scar, that I know so well, on his
+brow. And it is no vision; he is palpable to my touch! I will question
+the fact no longer, but deal with it as I best can."
+
+It was wonderful to see how the crisis developed in Miriam its own
+proper strength, and the faculty of sustaining the demands which it made
+upon her fortitude. She ceased to tremble; the beautiful woman gazed
+sternly at her dead enemy, endeavoring to meet and quell the look of
+accusation that he threw from between his half-closed eyelids.
+
+"No; thou shalt not scowl me down!" said she. "Neither now, nor when
+we stand together at the judgment-seat. I fear not to meet thee there.
+Farewell, till that next encounter!"
+
+Haughtily waving her hand, Miriam rejoined her friends, who were
+awaiting her at the door of the church. As they went out, the sacristan
+stopped them, and proposed to show the cemetery of the convent, where
+the deceased members of the fraternity are laid to rest in sacred earth,
+brought long ago from Jerusalem.
+
+"And will yonder monk be buried there?" she asked.
+
+"Brother Antonio?" exclaimed the sacristan.
+
+"Surely, our good brother will be put to bed there! His grave is already
+dug, and the last occupant has made room for him. Will you look at it,
+signorina?"
+
+"I will!" said Miriam.
+
+"Then excuse me," observed Kenyon; "for I shall leave you. One dead monk
+has more than sufficed me; and I am not bold enough to face the whole
+mortality of the convent."
+
+It was easy to see, by Donatello's looks, that he, as well as the
+sculptor, would gladly have escaped a visit to the famous cemetery of
+the Cappuccini. But Miriam's nerves were strained to such a pitch, that
+she anticipated a certain solace and absolute relief in passing from
+one ghastly spectacle to another of long-accumulated ugliness; and there
+was, besides, a singular sense of duty which impelled her to look at
+the final resting-place of the being whose fate had been so disastrously
+involved with her own. She therefore followed the sacristan's guidance,
+and drew her companion along with her, whispering encouragement as they
+went.
+
+The cemetery is beneath the church, but entirely above ground, and
+lighted by a row of iron-grated windows without glass. A corridor runs
+along beside these windows, and gives access to three or four vaulted
+recesses, or chapels, of considerable breadth and height, the floor of
+which consists of the consecrated earth of Jerusalem. It is smoothed
+decorously over the deceased brethren of the convent, and is kept
+quite free from grass or weeds, such as would grow even in these gloomy
+recesses, if pains were not bestowed to root them up. But, as the
+cemetery is small, and it is a precious privilege to sleep in holy
+ground, the brotherhood are immemorially accustomed, when one of their
+number dies, to take the longest buried skeleton out of the oldest
+grave, and lay the new slumberer there instead. Thus, each of the good
+friars, in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended
+with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before daybreak,
+as it were, and make room for another lodger.
+
+The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special
+interest of the cemetery. The arched and vaulted walls of the burial
+recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters made of
+thigh-bones and skulls; the whole material of the structure appears
+to be of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this
+strange architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and
+the more delicate tracery by the Smaller bones of the human frame. The
+summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if
+they were wrought most skilfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility
+of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a
+certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown
+in this queer way, nor what a multitude of dead monks, through how many
+hundred years, must have contributed their bony framework to build
+up these great arches of mortality. On some of the skulls there are
+inscriptions, purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of
+that particular headpiece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the
+greater number are piled up indistinguishably into the architectural
+design, like the many deaths that make up the one glory of a victory.
+
+In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or
+stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life, and labelled
+with their names and the dates of their decease. Their skulls (some
+quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that
+has known the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning
+hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if
+he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps
+is even now screeching through eternity. As a general thing, however,
+these frocked and hooded skeletons seem to take a more cheerful view of
+their position, and try with ghastly smiles to turn it into a jest. But
+the cemetery of the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes:
+the soul sinks forlorn and wretched under all this burden of dusty
+death; the holy earth from Jerusalem, so imbued is it with mortality,
+has grown as barren of the flowers of Paradise as it is of earthly weeds
+and grass. Thank Heaven for its blue sky; it needs a long, upward gaze
+to give us back our faith. Not here can we feel ourselves immortal,
+where the very altars in these chapels of horrible consecration are
+heaps of human bones.
+
+Yet let us give the cemetery the praise that it deserves. There is no
+disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from the decay of
+so many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken
+their departure. The same number of living monks would not smell half so
+unexceptionably.
+
+Miriam went gloomily along the corridor, from one vaulted Golgotha to
+another, until in the farthest recess she beheld an open grave.
+
+"Is that for him who lies yonder in the nave?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, signorina, this is to be the resting-place of Brother Antonio, who
+came to his death last night," answered the sacristan; "and in yonder
+niche, you see, sits a brother who was buried thirty years ago, and has
+risen to give him place."
+
+"It is not a satisfactory idea," observed Miriam, "that you poor friars
+cannot call even your graves permanently your own. You must lie down
+in them, methinks, with a nervous anticipation of being disturbed, like
+weary men who know that they shall be summoned out of bed at midnight.
+Is it not possible (if money were to be paid for the privilege) to leave
+Brother Antonio--if that be his name--in the occupancy of that narrow
+grave till the last trumpet sounds?"
+
+"By no means, signorina; neither is it needful or desirable," answered
+the sacristan. "A quarter of a century's sleep in the sweet earth
+of Jerusalem is better than a thousand years in any other soil. Our
+brethren find good rest there. No ghost was ever known to steal out of
+this blessed cemetery."
+
+"That is well," responded Miriam; "may he whom you now lay to sleep
+prove no exception to the rule!"
+
+As they left the cemetery she put money into the sacristan's hand to an
+amount that made his eyes open wide and glisten, and requested that it
+might be expended in masses for the repose of Father Antonio's soul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+THE MEDICI GARDENS
+
+
+"Donatello," said Miriam anxiously, as they came through the Piazza
+Barberini, "what can I do for you, my beloved friend? You are shaking as
+with the cold fit of the Roman fever." "Yes," said Donatello; "my heart
+shivers." As soon as she could collect her thoughts, Miriam led the
+young man to the gardens of the Villa Medici, hoping that the quiet
+shade and sunshine of that delightful retreat would a little revive his
+spirits. The grounds are there laid out in the old fashion of straight
+paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and
+density, and are shorn and trimmed to the evenness of a wall of
+stone, at the top and sides. There are green alleys, with long vistas
+overshadowed by ilex-trees; and at each intersection of the paths, the
+visitor finds seats of lichen-covered stone to repose upon, and marble
+statues that look forlornly at him, regretful of their lost noses. In
+the more open portions of the garden, before the sculptured front of
+the villa, you see fountains and flower-beds, and in their season
+a profusion of roses, from which the genial sun of Italy distils a
+fragrance, to be scattered abroad by the no less genial breeze.
+
+But Donatello drew no delight from these things. He walked onward in
+silent apathy, and looked at Miriam with strangely half-awakened and
+bewildered eyes, when she sought to bring his mind into sympathy with
+hers, and so relieve his heart of the burden that lay lumpishly upon it.
+
+She made him sit down on a stone bench, where two embowered alleys
+crossed each other; so that they could discern the approach of any
+casual intruder a long way down the path.
+
+"My sweet friend," she said, taking one of his passive hands in both of
+hers, "what can I say to comfort you?"
+
+"Nothing!" replied Donatello, with sombre reserve. "Nothing will ever
+comfort me."
+
+"I accept my own misery," continued Miriam, "my own guilt, if guilt it
+be; and, whether guilt or misery, I shall know how to deal with it. But
+you, dearest friend, that were the rarest creature in all this world,
+and seemed a being to whom sorrow could not cling,--you, whom I
+half fancied to belong to a race that had vanished forever, you only
+surviving, to show mankind how genial and how joyous life used to be, in
+some long-gone age,--what had you to do with grief or crime?"
+
+"They came to me as to other men," said Donatello broodingly. "Doubtless
+I was born to them."
+
+"No, no; they came with me," replied Miriam. "Mine is the
+responsibility! Alas! wherefore was I born? Why did we ever meet? Why
+did I not drive you from me, knowing for my heart foreboded it--that the
+cloud in which I walked would likewise envelop you!"
+
+Donatello stirred uneasily, with the irritable impatience that is often
+combined With a mood of leaden despondency. A brown lizard with two
+tails--a monster often engendered by the Roman sunshine--ran across his
+foot, and made him start. Then he sat silent awhile, and so did Miriam,
+trying to dissolve her whole heart into sympathy, and lavish it all upon
+him, were it only for a moment's cordial.
+
+The young man lifted his hand to his breast, and, unintentionally, as
+Miriam's hand was within his, he lifted that along with it. "I have a
+great weight here!" said he. The fancy struck Miriam (but she drove it
+resolutely down) that Donatello almost imperceptibly shuddered, while,
+in pressing his own hand against his heart, he pressed hers there too.
+
+"Rest your heart on me, dearest one!" she resumed. "Let me bear all its
+weight; I am well able to bear it; for I am a woman, and I love you! I
+love you, Donatello! Is there no comfort for you in this avowal? Look
+at me! Heretofore you have found me pleasant to your sight. Gaze into my
+eyes! Gaze into my soul! Search as deeply as you may, you can never see
+half the tenderness and devotion that I henceforth cherish for you. All
+that I ask is your acceptance of the utter self-sacrifice (but it shall
+be no sacrifice, to my great love) with which I seek to remedy the evil
+you have incurred for my sake!"
+
+All this fervor on Miriam's part; on Donatello's, a heavy silence.
+
+"O, speak to me!" she exclaimed. "Only promise me to be, by and by, a
+little happy!"
+
+"Happy?" murmured Donatello. "Ah, never again! never again!"
+
+"Never? Ah, that is a terrible word to say to me!" answered Miriam. "A
+terrible word to let fall upon a woman's heart, when she loves you, and
+is conscious of having caused your misery! If you love me, Donatello,
+speak it not again. And surely you did love me?"
+
+"I did," replied Donatello gloomily and absently.
+
+Miriam released the young man's hand, but suffered one of her own to
+lie close to his, and waited a moment to see whether he would make
+any effort to retain it. There was much depending upon that simple
+experiment.
+
+With a deep sigh--as when, sometimes, a slumberer turns over in a
+troubled dream Donatello changed his position, and clasped both his
+hands over his forehead. The genial warmth of a Roman April kindling
+into May was in the atmosphere around them; but when Miriam saw
+that involuntary movement and heard that sigh of relief (for so she
+interpreted it), a shiver ran through her frame, as if the iciest wind
+of the Apennines were blowing over her.
+
+"He has done himself a greater wrong than I dreamed of," thought she,
+with unutterable compassion. "Alas! it was a sad mistake! He might
+have had a kind of bliss in the consequences of this deed, had he been
+impelled to it by a love vital enough to survive the frenzy of that
+terrible moment, mighty enough to make its own law, and justify itself
+against the natural remorse. But to have perpetrated a dreadful murder
+(and such was his crime, unless love, annihilating moral distinctions,
+made it otherwise) on no better warrant than a boy's idle fantasy! I
+pity him from the very depths of my soul! As for myself, I am past my
+own or other's pity."
+
+She arose from the young man's side, and stood before him with a sad,
+commiserating aspect; it was the look of a ruined soul, bewailing,
+in him, a grief less than what her profounder sympathies imposed upon
+herself.
+
+"Donatello, we must part," she said, with melancholy firmness. "Yes;
+leave me! Go back to your old tower, which overlooks the green valley
+you have told me of among the Apennines. Then, all that has passed will
+be recognized as but an ugly dream. For in dreams the conscience sleeps,
+and we often stain ourselves with guilt of which we should be incapable
+in our waking moments. The deed you seemed to do, last night, was
+no more than such a dream; there was as little substance in what you
+fancied yourself doing. Go; and forget it all!"
+
+"Ah, that terrible face!" said Donatello, pressing his hands over his
+eyes. "Do you call that unreal?"
+
+"Yes; for you beheld it with dreaming eyes," replied Miriam. "It was
+unreal; and, that you may feel it so, it is requisite that you see this
+face of mine no more. Once, you may have thought it beautiful; now, it
+has lost its charm. Yet it would still retain a miserable potency' to
+bring back the past illusion, and, in its train, the remorse and anguish
+that would darken all your life. Leave me, therefore, and forget me."
+
+"Forget you, Miriam!" said Donatello, roused somewhat from his apathy of
+despair.
+
+"If I could remember you, and behold you, apart from that frightful
+visage which stares at me over your shoulder, that were a consolation,
+at least, if not a joy."
+
+"But since that visage haunts you along with mine," rejoined Miriam,
+glancing behind her, "we needs must part. Farewell, then! But if
+ever--in distress, peril, shame, poverty, or whatever anguish is most
+poignant, whatever burden heaviest--you should require a life to be
+given wholly, only to make your own a little easier, then summon me! As
+the case now stands between us, you have bought me dear, and find me of
+little worth. Fling me away, therefore! May you never need me more! But,
+if otherwise, a wish--almost an unuttered wish will bring me to you!"
+
+She stood a moment, expecting a reply. But Donatello's eyes had again
+fallen on the ground, and he had not, in his bewildered mind and
+overburdened heart, a word to respond.
+
+"That hour I speak of may never come," said Miriam. "So
+farewell--farewell forever."
+
+"Farewell," said Donatello.
+
+His voice hardly made its way through the environment of unaccustomed
+thoughts and emotions which had settled over him like a dense and dark
+cloud. Not improbably, he beheld Miriam through so dim a medium that she
+looked visionary; heard her speak only in a thin, faint echo.
+
+She turned from the young man, and, much as her heart yearned towards
+him, she would not profane that heavy parting by an embrace, or even a
+pressure of the hand. So soon after the semblance of such mighty love,
+and after it had been the impulse to so terrible a deed, they parted,
+in all outward show, as coldly as people part whose whole mutual
+intercourse has been encircled within a single hour.
+
+And Donatello, when Miriam had departed, stretched himself at full
+length on the stone bench, and drew his hat over his eyes, as the idle
+and light-hearted youths of dreamy Italy are accustomed to do, when they
+lie down in the first convenient shade, and snatch a noonday slumber.
+A stupor was upon him, which he mistook for such drowsiness as he had
+known in his innocent past life. But, by and by, he raised himself
+slowly and left the garden. Sometimes poor Donatello started, as if
+he heard a shriek; sometimes he shrank back, as if a face, fearful to
+behold, were thrust close to his own. In this dismal mood, bewildered
+with the novelty of sin and grief, he had little left of that singular
+resemblance, on account of which, and for their sport, his three friends
+had fantastically recognized him as the veritable Faun of Praxiteles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+MIRIAM AND HILDA
+
+
+On leaving the Medici Gardens Miriam felt herself astray in the world;
+and having no special reason to seek one place more than another, she
+suffered chance to direct her steps as it would. Thus it happened, that,
+involving herself in the crookedness of Rome, she saw Hilda's tower
+rising before her, and was put in mind to climb to the young girl's
+eyry, and ask why she had broken her engagement at the church of the
+Capuchins. People often do the idlest acts of their lifetime in their
+heaviest and most anxious moments; so that it would have been no wonder
+had Miriam been impelled only by so slight a motive of curiosity as we
+have indicated. But she remembered, too, and with a quaking heart, what
+the sculptor had mentioned of Hilda's retracing her steps towards the
+courtyard of the Palazzo Caffarelli in quest of Miriam herself. Had she
+been compelled to choose between infamy in the eyes of the whole world,
+or in Hilda's eyes alone, she would unhesitatingly have accepted the
+former, on condition of remaining spotless in the estimation of her
+white-souled friend. This possibility, therefore, that Hilda had
+witnessed the scene of the past night, was unquestionably the cause
+that drew Miriam to the tower, and made her linger and falter as she
+approached it.
+
+As she drew near, there were tokens to which her disturbed mind gave a
+sinister interpretation. Some of her friend's airy family, the doves,
+with their heads imbedded disconsolately in their bosoms, were huddled
+in a corner of the piazza; others had alighted on the heads, wings,
+shoulders, and trumpets of the marble angels which adorned the facade
+of the neighboring church; two or three had betaken themselves to the
+Virgin's shrine; and as many as could find room were sitting on Hilda's
+window-sill. But all of them, so Miriam fancied, had a look of weary
+expectation and disappointment, no flights, no flutterings, no cooing
+murmur; something that ought to have made their day glad and bright
+was evidently left out of this day's history. And, furthermore, Hilda's
+white window-curtain was closely drawn, with only that one little
+aperture at the side, which Miriam remembered noticing the night before.
+
+"Be quiet," said Miriam to her own heart, pressing her hand hard upon
+it. "Why shouldst thou throb now? Hast thou not endured more terrible
+things than this?"
+
+Whatever were her apprehensions, she would not turn back. It might
+be--and the solace would be worth a world--that Hilda, knowing nothing
+of the past night's calamity, would greet her friend with a sunny smile,
+and so restore a portion of the vital warmth, for lack of which her soul
+was frozen. But could Miriam, guilty as she was, permit Hilda to kiss
+her cheek, to clasp her hand, and thus be no longer so unspotted from
+the world as heretofore.
+
+"I will never permit her sweet touch again," said Miriam, toiling up
+the staircase, "if I can find strength of heart to forbid it. But, O! it
+would be so soothing in this wintry fever-fit of my heart. There can be
+no harm to my white Hilda in one parting kiss. That shall be all!"
+
+But, on reaching the upper landing-place, Miriam paused, and stirred not
+again till she had brought herself to an immovable resolve.
+
+"My lips, my hand, shall never meet Hilda's more," said she.
+
+Meanwhile, Hilda sat listlessly in her painting-room. Had you looked
+into the little adjoining chamber, you might have seen the slight
+imprint of her figure on the bed, but would also have detected at once
+that the white counterpane had not been turned down. The pillow was more
+disturbed; she had turned her face upon it, the poor child, and bedewed
+it with some of those tears (among the most chill and forlorn that gush
+from human sorrow) which the innocent heart pours forth at its first
+actual discovery that sin is in the world. The young and pure are not
+apt to find out that miserable truth until it is brought home to them by
+the guiltiness of some trusted friend. They may have heard much of
+the evil of the world, and seem to know it, but only as an impalpable
+theory. In due time, some mortal, whom they reverence too highly,
+is commissioned by Providence to teach them this direful lesson; he
+perpetrates a sin; and Adam falls anew, and Paradise, heretofore in
+unfaded bloom, is lost again, and dosed forever, with the fiery swords
+gleaming at its gates.
+
+The chair in which Hilda sat was near the portrait of Beatrice Cenci,
+which had not yet been taken from the easel. It is a peculiarity of
+this picture, that its profoundest expression eludes a straightforward
+glance, and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye
+falls casually upon it; even as if the painted face had a life and
+consciousness of its own, and, resolving not to betray its secret of
+grief or guilt, permitted the true tokens to come forth only when it
+imagined itself unseen. No other such magical effect has ever been
+wrought by pencil.
+
+Now, opposite the easel hung a looking-glass, in which Beatrice's face
+and Hilda's were both reflected. In one of her weary, nerveless changes
+of position, Hilda happened to throw her eyes on the glass, and took in
+both these images at one unpremeditated glance. She fancied--nor was it
+without horror--that Beatrice's expression, seen aside and vanishing in
+a moment, had been depicted in her own face likewise, and flitted from
+it as timorously.
+
+"Am I, too, stained with guilt?" thought the poor girl, hiding her face
+in her hands.
+
+Not so, thank Heaven! But, as regards Beatrice's picture, the incident
+suggests a theory which may account for its unutterable grief and
+mysterious shadow of guilt, without detracting from the purity which we
+love to attribute to that ill-fated girl. Who, indeed, can look at that
+mouth,--with its lips half apart, as innocent as a babe's that has
+been crying, and not pronounce Beatrice sinless? It was the intimate
+consciousness of her father's sin that threw its shadow over her, and
+frightened her into a remote and inaccessible region, where no sympathy
+could come. It was the knowledge of Miriam's guilt that lent the same
+expression to Hilda's face.
+
+But Hilda nervously moved her chair, so that the images in the glass
+should be no longer Visible. She now watched a speck of sunshine that
+came through a shuttered window, and crept from object to object,
+indicating each with a touch of its bright finger, and then letting them
+all vanish successively. In like manner her mind, so like sunlight
+in its natural cheerfulness, went from thought to thought, but found
+nothing that it could dwell upon for comfort. Never before had this
+young, energetic, active spirit known what it is to be despondent. It
+was the unreality of the world that made her so. Her dearest friend,
+whose heart seemed the most solid and richest of Hilda's possessions,
+had no existence for her any more; and in that dreary void, out of which
+Miriam had disappeared, the substance, the truth, the integrity of life,
+the motives of effort, the joy of success, had departed along with her.
+
+It was long past noon, when a step came up the staircase. It had passed
+beyond the limits where there was communication with the lower regions
+of the palace, and was mounting the successive flights which led only to
+Hilda's precincts. Faint as the tread was, she heard and recognized it.
+It startled her into sudden life. Her first impulse was to spring to
+the door of the studio, and fasten it with lock and bolt. But a second
+thought made her feel that this would be an unworthy cowardice, on her
+own part, and also that Miriam--only yesterday her closest friend had
+a right to be told, face to face, that thenceforth they must be forever
+strangers.
+
+She heard Miriam pause, outside of the door. We have already seen what
+was the latter's resolve with respect to any kiss or pressure of
+the hand between Hilda and herself. We know not what became of the
+resolution. As Miriam was of a highly impulsive character, it may have
+vanished at the first sight of Hilda; but, at all events, she appeared
+to have dressed herself up in a garb of sunshine, and was disclosed, as
+the door swung open, in all the glow of her remarkable beauty. The truth
+was, her heart leaped conclusively towards the only refuge that it had,
+or hoped. She forgot, just one instant, all cause for holding herself
+aloof. Ordinarily there was a certain reserve in Miriam's demonstrations
+of affection, in consonance with the delicacy of her friend. To-day, she
+opened her arms to take Hilda in.
+
+"Dearest, darling Hilda!" she exclaimed. "It gives me new life to see
+you!"
+
+Hilda was standing in the middle of the room. When her friend made a
+step or two from the door, she put forth her hands with an involuntary
+repellent gesture, so expressive that Miriam at once felt a great chasm
+opening itself between them two. They might gaze at one another from the
+opposite side, but without the possibility of ever meeting more; or, at
+least, since the chasm could never be bridged over, they must tread
+the whole round of Eternity to meet on the other side. There was even
+a terror in the thought of their meeting again. It was as if Hilda or
+Miriam were dead, and could no longer hold intercourse without violating
+a spiritual law.
+
+Yet, in the wantonness of her despair, Miriam made one more step towards
+the friend whom she had lost. "Do not come nearer, Miriam!" said
+Hilda. Her look and tone were those of sorrowful entreaty, and yet
+they expressed a kind of confidence, as if the girl were conscious of a
+safeguard that could not be violated.
+
+"What has happened between us, Hilda?" asked Miriam. "Are we not
+friends?"
+
+"No, no!" said Hilda, shuddering.
+
+"At least we have been friends," continued Miriam. "I loved you dearly!
+I love you still! You were to me as a younger sister; yes, dearer than
+sisters of the same blood; for you and I were so lonely, Hilda, that the
+whole world pressed us together by its solitude and strangeness. Then,
+will you not touch my hand? Am I not the same as yesterday?"
+
+"Alas! no, Miriam!" said Hilda.
+
+"Yes, the same, the same for you, Hilda," rejoined her lost friend.
+"Were you to touch my hand, you would find it as warm to your grasp as
+ever. If you were sick or suffering, I would watch night and day for
+you. It is in such simple offices that true affection shows itself;
+and so I speak of them. Yet now, Hilda, your very look seems to put me
+beyond the limits of human kind!"
+
+"It is not I, Miriam," said Hilda; "not I that have done this."
+
+"You, and you only, Hilda," replied Miriam, stirred up to make her own
+cause good by the repellent force which her friend opposed to her. "I am
+a woman, as I was yesterday; endowed with the same truth of nature, the
+same warmth of heart, the same genuine and earnest love, which you
+have always known in me. In any regard that concerns yourself, I am not
+changed. And believe me, Hilda, when a human being has chosen a friend
+out of all the world, it is only some faithlessness between themselves,
+rendering true intercourse impossible, that can justify either friend in
+severing the bond. Have I deceived you? Then cast me off! Have I wronged
+you personally? Then forgive me, if you can. But, have I sinned against
+God and man, and deeply sinned? Then be more my friend than ever, for I
+need you more."
+
+"Do not bewilder me thus, Miriam!" exclaimed Hilda, who had not forborne
+to express, by look and gesture, the anguish which this interview
+inflicted on her. "If I were one of God's angels, with a nature
+incapable of stain, and garments that never could be spotted, I would
+keep ever at your side, and try to lead you upward. But I am a poor,
+lonely girl, whom God has set here in an evil world, and given her only
+a white robe, and bid her wear it back to Him, as white as when she put
+it on. Your powerful magnetism would be too much for me. The pure, white
+atmosphere, in which I try to discern what things are good and true,
+would be discolored. And therefore, Miriam, before it is too late, I
+mean to put faith in this awful heartquake which warns me henceforth to
+avoid you."
+
+"Ah, this is hard! Ah, this is terrible!" murmured Miriam, dropping her
+forehead in her hands. In a moment or two she looked up again, as pale
+as death, but with a composed countenance: "I always said, Hilda, that
+you were merciless; for I had a perception of it, even while you
+loved me best. You have no sin, nor any conception of what it is; and
+therefore you are so terribly severe! As an angel, you are not amiss;
+but, as a human creature, and a woman among earthly men and women, you
+need a sin to soften you."
+
+"God forgive me," said Hilda, "if I have said a needlessly cruel word!"
+
+"Let it pass," answered Miriam; "I, whose heart it has smitten upon,
+forgive you. And tell me, before we part forever, what have you seen or
+known of me, since we last met?"
+
+"A terrible thing, Miriam," said Hilda, growing paler than before.
+
+"Do you see it written in my face, or painted in my eyes?" inquired
+Miriam, her trouble seeking relief in a half-frenzied raillery. "I would
+fain know how it is that Providence, or fate, brings eye-witnesses to
+watch us, when we fancy ourselves acting in the remotest privacy. Did
+all Rome see it, then? Or, at least, our merry company of artists? Or is
+it some blood-stain on me, or death-scent in my garments? They say that
+monstrous deformities sprout out of fiends, who once were lovely angels.
+Do you perceive such in me already? Tell me, by our past friendship,
+Hilda, all you know."
+
+Thus adjured, and frightened by the wild emotion which Miriam could not
+suppress, Hilda strove to tell what she had witnessed.
+
+"After the rest of the party had passed on, I went back to speak to
+you," she said; "for there seemed to be a trouble on your mind, and I
+wished to share it with you, if you could permit me. The door of the
+little courtyard was partly shut; but I pushed it open, and saw you
+within, and Donatello, and a third person, whom I had before noticed in
+the shadow of a niche. He approached you, Miriam. You knelt to him! I
+saw Donatello spring upon him! I would have shrieked, but my throat
+was dry. I would have rushed forward, but my limbs seemed rooted to the
+earth. It was like a flash of lightning. A look passed from your eyes to
+Donatello's--a look."--"Yes, Hilda, yes!" exclaimed Miriam, with intense
+eagerness. "Do not pause now! That look?"
+
+"It revealed all your heart, Miriam," continued Hilda, covering her
+eyes as if to shut out the recollection; "a look of hatred, triumph,
+vengeance, and, as it were, joy at some unhoped-for relief."
+
+"Ah! Donatello was right, then," murmured Miriam, who shook throughout
+all her frame. "My eyes bade him do it! Go on, Hilda."
+
+"It all passed so quickly, all like a glare of lightning," said Hilda,
+"and yet it seemed to me that Donatello had paused, while one might draw
+a breath. But that look! Ah, Miriam, spare me. Need I tell more?"
+
+"No more; there needs no more, Hilda," replied Miriam, bowing her head,
+as if listening to a sentence of condemnation from a supreme tribunal.
+"It is enough! You have satisfied my mind on a point where it was
+greatly disturbed. Henceforward I shall be quiet. Thank you, Hilda."
+
+She was on the point of departing, but turned back again from the
+threshold.
+
+"This is a terrible secret to be kept in a young girl's bosom," she
+observed; "what will you do with it, my poor child?"
+
+"Heaven help and guide me," answered Hilda, bursting into tears; "for
+the burden of it crushes me to the earth! It seems a crime to know
+of such a thing, and to keep it to myself. It knocks within my heart
+continually, threatening, imploring, insisting to be let out! O my
+mother!--my mother! Were she yet living, I would travel over land and
+sea to tell her this dark secret, as I told all the little troubles of
+my infancy. But I am alone--alone! Miriam, you were my dearest, only
+friend. Advise me what to do."
+
+This was a singular appeal, no doubt, from the stainless maiden to the
+guilty woman, whom she had just banished from her heart forever. But
+it bore striking testimony to the impression which Miriam's natural
+uprightness and impulsive generosity had made on the friend who knew her
+best; and it deeply comforted the poor criminal, by proving to her that
+the bond between Hilda and herself was vital yet.
+
+As far as she was able, Miriam at once responded to the girl's cry for
+help.
+
+"If I deemed it good for your peace of mind," she said, "to bear
+testimony against me for this deed in the face of all the world, no
+consideration of myself should weigh with me an instant. But I believe
+that you would find no relief in such a course. What men call justice
+lies chiefly in outward formalities, and has never the close application
+and fitness that would be satisfactory to a soul like yours. I cannot be
+fairly tried and judged before an earthly tribunal; and of this, Hilda,
+you would perhaps become fatally conscious when it was too late. Roman
+justice, above all things, is a byword. What have you to do with it?
+Leave all such thoughts aside! Yet, Hilda, I would not have you keep my
+secret imprisoned in your heart if it tries to leap out, and stings you,
+like a wild, venomous thing, when you thrust it back again. Have you no
+other friend, now that you have been forced to give me up?"
+
+"No other," answered Hilda sadly.
+
+"Yes; Kenyon!" rejoined Miriam.
+
+"He cannot be my friend," said Hilda, "because--because--I have fancied
+that he sought to be something more."
+
+"Fear nothing!" replied Miriam, shaking her head, with a strange smile.
+"This story will frighten his new-born love out of its little life, if
+that be what you wish. Tell him the secret, then, and take his wise and
+honorable counsel as to what should next be done. I know not what else
+to say."
+
+"I never dreamed," said Hilda,--"how could you think it?--of betraying
+you to justice. But I see how it is, Miriam. I must keep your secret,
+and die of it, unless God sends me some relief by methods which are now
+beyond my power to imagine. It is very dreadful. Ah! now I understand
+how the sins of generations past have created an atmosphere of sin
+for those that follow. While there is a single guilty person in the
+universe, each innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that
+guilt. Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!"
+
+Poor Hilda turned from her unhappy friend, and, sinking on her knees in
+a corner of the chamber, could not be prevailed upon to utter another
+word. And Miriam, with a long regard from the threshold, bade farewell
+to this doves' nest, this one little nook of pure thoughts and innocent
+enthusiasms, into which she had brought such trouble. Every crime
+destroys more Edens than our own!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Marble Faun, Volume I., by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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